


Answer For

by viktorstardust



Category: LISA (Video Games)
Genre: Coping, Family Dynamics, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Medium Burn, Post-Canon, Post-Joyful, Trust Issues, buddy learns how to trust her stupid step dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:42:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 30,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25383274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viktorstardust/pseuds/viktorstardust
Summary: “I bet he’s happy you’re safe.” Terry smiles sadly and looks up at her. “None of us wanted you to get hurt...”Nobody ever does see what they’re doing as hurting her. The fate of humanity has always meant more than how she felt. She reaches under the hair covering the three parallel scars over her eye to touch them. A reminder of how much she’s been hurt for humanity's sake.“Yeah.”
Comments: 73
Kudos: 114





	1. Seclude

Each morning when she wakes up, she climbs to the top of a barren and sun-kissed plateau that burns the bottoms of her feet and she plays her trumpet. At night, or what is her night when the sun fails to set, she does the same and climbs to the top of the highest point she can access without leaving her handmade border of barbed wire and scrapped wood from the fallout she made, and plays that rusted trumpet a bit better every time. 

She has only a vague idea of why she’s compelled into this morning and nighttime routine. She is the God of this wasteland. The trumpet wakes Olathe up, puts Olathe gently to sleep. The trumpet keeps the beast quiet, the trumpet makes her son smile.

But none of that is really true. No matter how many days go by with her playing her song for nobody, she still feels like this world’s prize. An object, a weapon utilized by this doomed humanity.

She climbs down from her hill. She doesn’t much feel up to playing it today.

The boy is slung to her side, cradled in stolen clothes she tied into a wrap to hold him in when she has to use her hands. Months and days, she hasn’t been keeping count of, but he’s almost too heavy for the sling. However long it’s been, he’s getting older and he still doesn’t have a name. She thinks often about how she was named, try as she might to forget the past. No playful little nicknames or lazy sentiments to be had from her, so those memories aren’t helpful. She’s thinking he might just have to live his life, however long he’ll have one, as “the boy”.

He coos a little at her in confusion when he doesn’t hear the trumpet play its daily song, reaching up with clumsy little hands to try and reach for it.

“Not today.” she mutters, setting the thing down by the kindling where their fire was last night, still smoking. At first, she had been hesitant to keep a fire lit in case the smoke drew anyone close to her. Over time, she realized that what was left if Olathe had bigger problems than investigating smoke signals. Rando, Dusty, had taught her how to start fires. Brad never found a reason to, since she was never supposed to have the need to start a fire at all. Of all the worst-case-scenarios he’d prepared her for, escape had not been one of them.

In her lies a dormant need to be better to the baby and give him a life better than the life she knew. It was easier said than done since life for her had, and would always be, a struggle. She’d grown to accept it as her lot in life. It seemed impossible to show this baby, presumably the first human life since she herself had been born, a world that was not the world they lived in. Because a world better than Olathe was either far away or nonexistent. There is nothing left around them for miles. Nothing but what had been left behind. That sustains them for now, but it won’t forever.

For now, her days go as follows:

Scavenge what’s left. Houses, makeshift dirt huts, and relics from a past that she was not part of. It all exists in a state of before her. Before her, after her. Before her birth, before she took Olathe for herself. She wonders when things are going to stop becoming the past and start becoming the present. 

Next, use what’s left to make things easier. She doesn’t know how to build or cook something that wouldn’t kill her and the kid if they so much as smelled it, so rations are a girl’s best friend. The majority of this rough-hewn society was uprooted before she got there. She guesses it became less about finding her and more about surviving her. The thought makes her feel bitter and ugly inside. She’s stopped believing that things could ever go back to the stifling comfort of her life with Brad, but she sometimes thinks back to those green fields and clear streams Dusty had told her he grew up in. What it would be like to be born in those green, flower-strangled fields with nothing to worry about but playing in the dirt. She’d passed that age. Passed that way of life. So she uses the things she finds on her scavenges to build a crumbling society of her own within the desolate wasteland that she lives in now, the one she was born into.

Then she checks on the monster. It has stopped being known as ‘Brad’ to her. That’s a lie. The deformed animal that spends its days stretched out under the beating sun will always somehow be him, but it hurts less to just call it the monster. It doesn’t seem to need to eat, but it likes to, so she brings animal carcasses that she doesn’t know how to safely cook yet and lets it feast. Not many things have changed when she remembers Brad when he would drink and sink somehow even lower and the Brad she sees now isn’t very different from that memory. For the most part, it stays quiet and out of her way. She hasn’t let the baby go near it yet, and she’s not sure if she ever will.

Today is not a scavenging day. And it’s not a watch-the-monster day, either. 

She doesn’t feel like doing much of anything at all.

Sometimes it’s paralyzing. The weight of it all. That she must go on living in a world that she killed because she was taught to see herself as both a hero and a victim. A hero who would save the world, but a victim that the world would always attempt to use. The conflicting of those messages are staggering. 

She’s brought back to reality when the baby starts fussing at her for something. It’s always something. She pulls him out of the sling around her shoulders and lays him down. He’s getting big but he’s still so tiny. Tiny hands and tiny feet and tiny eyes looking at her to know what to do. She’s started keeping a little mental journal of all the small changes she notices. Yesterday, she noticed he can hold his head up without her now. Today she notices his wispy black hair starting to grow thicker. Something in her feels proud. A little swelling in her chest that maybe makes some of this worth it. Right now, she and her baby know each other more than anyone else out here. 

Maybe that counts for something.

He’s stopped fussing by the time he’s settled on the ground next to her. Maybe all he wanted was to be taken out of the carrier and placed on the ground to look up at the clouds passing over them. Buddy manages a smile. She used to love the clouds, too. She’d asked Brad and her uncles what they were, and half of them had different answers because half of them didn’t actually know what they were. Things could only be so simple for now. Just like a child would only be this simple right now. She’d obviously never met anyone younger than post-apocalyptic Olathe, but she remembers what it was like to be simple. 

“You just wanted to see the sky?” She asks him in her best gentle voice. It’s raspy and strained, but the baby always seems to like it when she speaks. She touches the silky hairs on his delicate head, so soft in a world of nothing but rough edges. She wonders if he will grow to hate her. Those wide eyes staring up at the clouds in wonder turning into a venomous gaze towards the person that failed to make his life everything it should’ve been. It’s a hard concept to swallow. 

“Promise you won’t hate me for this.”

The baby coos and wiggles around like a little worm in the dirt. As good a promise as any.

She grabs one of his tiny hands. He wraps his fingers around hers as best he can. That’s all they can do — the best they can. For a peaceful, long while, it’s just her and the boy holding onto each other as the morning sun beats down behind the occasional set of clouds. It’s as much as she can handle right now, and it’s nice. 

All good things do eventually come to an end.

This one ends when she sees a stranger over the barbed-wire fence.


	2. Invade

It’s been a while since she’s done this. 

The bastard can only pray she’s rusty at it, though.

With her body low to the ground like a wild cat stalking, she gingerly picks up the baby so he doesn’t fuss, and puts him in her best excuse for a crib with what she has to work with, little more than a tattered blanket and wooden stakes driven into the ground to keep him from crawling away. 

She draws her sword, an old friend that she keeps closer than her own family. What’s left of it. The hilt feels right in her hand. It’s where it belongs, both of them are where they belong. 

She peeks over the ledge where she saw him, some stupid bastard that didn’t get the memo that Olathe was not his anymore. She made it a point to not do this for fun, lest she become just like them. But he’s too close to her home for comfort. Climbing over the barbed wire is the line. 

She waits for him to get closer, then closer still until she fully draws her weapon and reveals herself, the blade inches from the intruder’s chest.

He stops, throws up his hands in a show of resignation while trying to back away from her range like he’s messing with a wild animal. She’s seen men do that before, and it’s always a lie. No one out here is defenseless. Those without a defense are the biggest targets. Rick had told her that, as a defenseless man himself. And he probably ended up just like the rest of the defenseless few.

She swipes at him when she thinks their gap might be closed enough, but he’s got a clumsy swiftness about him, just managing to stumble out of range every time the blade’s about to make contact. Either she’s more out of practice than she thought, or he’s got some fucking luck. The way he sidesteps her attacks is more than luck. Certainly not defenseless, certainly not someone she’ll have second thoughts about. The guy finally stumbles and she’s where she feels most comfortable; having the upper hand. He struggles in the dirt until she’s looming over him like the reaper himself.

She’s about ready to end this when the man pulls down the bandana covering his nose and mouth, hands shaking violently, pathetically. 

“Easy, hey…I-I’m not a threat...” He stutters out with his best innocent smile. She’s seen his face before. Whose face hasn’t she seen, crossing Olathe in under a month. 

She draws her sword back to swing it at his neck.

“I was a friend of your dad’s!” 

Buddy hesitates and looks at him a bit closer without putting her sword down. He’s not lying. She’s seen him, albeit fleetingly since everything moved so quickly back then, caught up in fear and anger and the need to just run away from all these people. The one time Brad had been able to take back his practical ownership over her, this man had looked on as a nervous bystander while Brad pitched a fit at her for doing what anyone would do, getting the fuck  _ away _ from it all. Then he’d meekly offered her some food, then the men in masks took control and she never spoke to him again, but did see him a few more times before he’d almost completely faded from her memory and her interest. He’s more weathered than he was then. Looking older and less optimistic, as they all were. His hair’s cut short and he’s suffered some scars since then. She imagines most of the few Olathian men left have come upon these hard times. More hopeless somehow than they were before.

None of that is enough reason for him to walk into her territory and live.

“Get out.” She speaks with a low certainty. Things cannot go on with him here. Yet somehow, her elbows are mercifully locked and won’t swing the blade down on his vulnerable neck. A peculiar sentimentality for someone that doesn’t matter. She’d rather he just go. 

“Please listen to me-“

She tenses up and grits her teeth, leering at him from above. “Get out.” Who is this man, what position does he think he’s in to start making demands?

He empties a bag strapped to his side onto the ground. Not a single weapon among pencils sharpened down to the erasers and pieces of yellowed paper. “Can I just talk to you? I haven’t seen you in so long, you’re, um...getting so big!”

She again finds her arm locked in place, unable to swing. She remembers the pacifists from Beautiful’s village, how even though they were so easy, mere target practice in the shape of men, she couldn’t bring herself to make them collateral damage. Her feelings about Brad are too complicated to dissect. Maybe the same goes for the stupid men he’d sonehow bribed into being a part of his orbit. She doesn’t know this person, not really. But she almost pities him for being involved in all this.

A few feet away, the baby starts crying for her. She curses herself for letting this go on for so long. This man may not be a threat, but if anyone left alive nearby hears her baby crying, they might get some funny ideas. 

With her sword still secure in her hand for good measure, she turns away and starts back towards the kid. “Tell me what you want and then just go.” 

The man stumbles to his feet to trail cautiously behind.

“Is that a baby?”

Is that even any question? What does he think she’s here for, a good time? She picks the baby up and starts making efforts to keep him quiet.

“Geez...but, you’re so y-“

“What do you want?” She cuts him off sharply.

“Oh,” he straightens his back and does his best to look proud and distinguished. “I’m the lord of hints — formerly. Now I’m the co-founder of a fortress back in west Olathe for those of us...left…” His posture deflates just as quickly as it straightened. “...I’m Terry. Me and your dad were close.”

Buddy looks at him like he’s stupid, but nods slowly. A fortress for the rest of humanity. She’s not worried about it if it’s true. She’s older now, perhaps less bloodthirsty. If a few sorry bastards with nothing left to do but barricade themselves somewhere away from her and drink themselves to death want to make a little club all the way back west, what does she care? The baby’s really the only thing that matters. “He’s not my dad.” It’s not true but it’s a defense mechanism for whenever people bring him up. Easier to disconnect herself from him than not to.

“Right.” The man, Terry apparently, sighs and scratches at his head. “What happened to him? After everything?”

He mass killed an army of men, collapsed from delirium at her feet, and became an abomination no different from any other abomination like him.

“He mutated.” 

She glances up in time to catch his shoulders sag, his entire upper body bending for the weight of the news. “Ah...yeah, I guess I figured that would happen…”

There’s another beat of silence. Even the baby has calmed down and is content to let his mother bounce him in her arms while he stares in awe at the first new person he’s seen since the day he was born. Hopefully he’ll be the last. Having someone else here makes her anxious and flighty like she was being passed around while she waited for people to come and take her to the next safepoint until she’d make it to Rando. The only way she had made it was when she stopped hiding behind people and went to him herself. She doesn’t like feeling like a captive audience. So she has to consider what this man wants. What’ll get him to leave sooner.

“Do you wanna see him or something?” If closure is what he needs, she can give it to him for free. She doesn’t care if he sees Brad. Seeing him like this might make him run back to his fortress and never come back.

Terry brightens a little with a sort of forlorn interest. His eyes are always wet like he’s about to cry. They were then, they’re even worse now. “Can I really?” 

His wide-eyed gratefulness makes her uncomfortable. Everything about him just makes her sad. Worse, it makes her think about who Brad was to him, who he was to her, who he was to everyone. Thinking about what kind of man he was before she found out she couldn’t count on him anymore is painful and raw like an open wound. 

She takes him to Brad with her baby’s face looking over her shoulder so he doesn’t see. Brad can’t move much without a struggle, but as long as he occasionally gets to see her or hear the sound of her trumpet, he doesn’t find much reason to. It looks like suffering. How could it not? He’s a mound of pulsating flesh with no voice, no language, no human concepts. But he’s not living in suffering. He’s living like the birds in the sky, the deer he eats. He’s living like an animal. Buddy can’t think of a more peaceful life than a life where you don’t understand your own situation.

Terry stares, slack-jawed for a moment as he takes it in. Buddy can’t help but wonder if he knows what did this. The perverse truth that only she now knows, about joy and its maker, the reason they live in hell on earth. Of course he doesn’t know about him, but he’s still here and he’s still human so maybe he knows what it does to people. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t miss it. Feeling nothing is a luxury she won’t accept anymore, out of principle. Out of respect for Dusty. Maybe for Buzzo. Definitely for the baby.

She watches Terry as he tightens his jaw and approaches Brad, who’s just basking in the sun without any thought behind his eyes. Dead to the world but forced to stay alive because Buddy can’t bring herself to kill him. Terry falls to his knees and holds out both his hands carefully and with some sort of knowledge in his movements, like he’s been professionally taught how to approach mutants without startling or provoking them. His outstretched hands land and cup Brad’s face, the only thing left intact from the mutation. 

“Hey, man,” he’s not crying like he seems he’s about to be, in fact, he sounds calm. Gentle and measured, talking to an animal. “Missed you.” Buddy watches as he wraps his arms around Brad’s fleshy neck and leans in to hug his head close to his chest, his chin resting on the mutant’s bald scalp. It’s too tender. Too familiar and kind. She doubts they were this familiar when Brad was still human. Brad avoided physical affection like it would kill him. 

“He was my best friend,” Terry sits up and speaks to her without looking at her. Just affectionately rubbing the side of Brad’s face with his palm. “I really loved him.”

Buddy’s silent. She doesn’t know what to do with that information.

“I bet he’s happy you’re safe.” Terry smiles sadly and looks up at her. “None of us wanted you to get hurt...”

Nobody ever does see what they’re doing as hurting her. The fate of humanity has always meant more than how she felt. She reaches under the hair covering the three parallel scars over her eye to touch them. A reminder of how much she’s been hurt for humanity. “Yeah.”

“Are you okay out here? Do you need food? Supplies?” The conversation has quickly shifted to her. She doesn’t like it. “Is the baby-“

“We’re fine.” She cuts him off. They’ve survived without help this long, they’ll survive without it longer. 

“There’s room for you and your baby back at the haven,” he explains, standing up and brushing himself off after one last soft gesture towards the monster. “We could keep you safe there.”

It’s out of the question. This is where Dusty’s grave is, this is her own haven. It’s safe from everyone except someone who knows no reason to fear her, like him. And he’s not a threat anyway. Just a headache. “No.”

Terry nods and squints up at the sun above them. “Yeah, okay.” Finally, he starts off in the direction they came. He’s about to cross the threshold of fencing that separates her camp from Brad when he turns back around. “Do you think...I could visit him again?”

Letting anyone in and letting them live is rare. Letting them in and letting them live and come back a second time, she might as well be telling the fucker to move in. She knows what happens. Trusting anyone but herself has ended in nothing but bloodshed. And she  _ liked  _ Dusty. She can’t say the same for the intruder that kisses the ground Brad walks on. 

But, Brad is not protected by the same barbed wire fencing as her and the baby. Maybe she holds a bit of sympathy for someone so caught up in the delusions he holds about Brad. Maybe it’s worth it to let him come with all his guilt and bring her rations and supplies because he’s so guilty and so willing to fork over his things to make sure he’s filling some imaginary promise to protect her while Brad’s a stupid animal that can’t do it himself.

Yeah. She doesn’t trust this guy for a second. 

But if she’s learned anything about Olathe, it’s that these kinds of things aren’t built on trust. Call it a business partnership.

“Don’t make a habit of it. You don’t go inside the fence.”

Terry’s pleasantly surprised, smiles and almost reaches out to put a friendly hand on her shoulder before she violently wrences herself away. He quickly backs off and thanks her, scooping his bag and the scattered contents back up, covering his mouth and nose with his bandana. She follows him all the way up until he hops over the fence again to make sure he’s really going, and before he leaves for good, he turns and asks her one more parting question.

“What’s the little one’s name? Forgot to ask.”

She can’t feasibly twist his words into being malicious; she knows he’s just too friendly and too curious. It’s foreign and awkward for her, but there’s no reason to hide something that doesn’t even exist. “He doesn’t have one.”

Terry chuckles and looks fondly at the infant over her shoulder. “Little no-name, huh?” He waves at the baby when he looks back at him, little fingers in his mouth and staring at the stranger with his moonlike eyes. “You’ll figure something out.”

Buddy’s head hurts. This has all become so unfamiliar to her. Had she also once been so blissfully unaware of the carnage and death around her? It’s like he doesn’t even know she killed her way to the lonely, lonely top of the list. Sometimes the oppressive darkness of the basement feels like safety again. A safety she never wants to return to but one she misses when this is all too much.

“Be seeing you.” Terry says, and then he’s gone. 

She sheathes her sword and watches the clouds as they go by.


	3. Haven

The Olathian Fortress is just the beehive with pointed wooden stakes fencing the rest of the world out.

It’s the perfect spot for the men stupid enough to stay here to hide. They got the news just like everyone else had. The Rando Army had fallen, the warlords had all died. There was nothing left and the unlucky few left alive were going outside the borders. Olathe was a failure.

There is no reason to be here. Wherever the other displaced Olathian men have gone is no doubt a safe place for humanity to die out in peace. But the swamplands are daunting enough to keep danger out. That had never stopped men in the past from seeking out the Beehive when it was still operating, but a brothel is the last place people fleeing danger will want to go.

The glue that binds them all together here is the target placed on their backs by Brad. Terry won’t admit it, but he knows everyone knows their faces because they killed their way across the wasteland with him, and there’s always someone who wants revenge when you kill another man. Brad’s killed dozens. Hundreds, maybe. They helped him. It wasn’t safe for them to flee with the rest of the stragglers, so they cut their hair and covered their faces with bandanas and became the outcasts left stranded at the new Beehive.

He returns from his daily trip back into what can still be called Olathe richer in supplies but at some sort of cost with a heavy mind and heart. He gets whoever’s operating the gate today to let him in and doesn’t greet him, doesn’t even see him. Everything feels all too heavy as he climbs up to his room and collapses onto the splintered wooden floor.

He’s got Brad on his mind again. It’s always been a problem of his. 

He’s waited five years here. Five years left in the dark about what happened after Brad took their boat and left for somewhere, probably for his own death. He’s used to not knowing things, more used to it than anyone here, but it’s a knife to the gut knowing that Brad didn’t need him after all. 

Part of him wishes Brad had died there. Save him the shame.

He runs his hands through the hair he cut away to make himself look less like the man that had been seen next to the tyrant that wiped out enough Rando soldiers to make him an enemy of the state, and tosses all the hints he was supposed to put up today out onto the floor.

The hints are still important to him. That’s why he always volunteers for supply runs. Nobody will see them, and nowadays they’ve mostly become advertisements for the haven, but he knows he’s just putting up fliers on a town with no residents. It’s mostly for him. 

He feels like he can’t really tell anyone what he saw today. Plenty of friends for the first time in his life and he can’t even tell them he saw the former “savior of Olathe” while he was out scavenging and she has the first baby born in almost two decades with her. There’s a bitter taste in his mouth. Somehow he feels like he failed Brad, failed him and his daughter and that baby. Call it inserting himself into a story he never belonged in, but he feels like it was owed of him. Expected of him. He could’ve brought her back here. She’d be happier here.

“Yeah, right.” He mutters to himself, picks up off the floor and leaves his room.

Brad had several men fighting alongside him. Only about half of them made it here. The others detached themselves from the group, disbanded when Brad left to find redemption somewhere else. A lot of people were with him — not a lot of people really liked him.

The half of them that stayed helped him form this isolated community of people whose faces became too synonymous with Brad’s to break away from each other. Terry likes to call them friends, he’s sure not all of them see each other like that. Anything’s better than scarecrows.

He scales up to one of the higher floors for some air that rises above the musty swamp waters. Sometimes he feels suffocated here, in the close quarters with doors that don’t shut out the heat and the feeling of being trapped here like convicts. It’s no utopia. Nothing out here is.

They spend most days drinking and telling the same stories over and over again, but there are some safety measures in place, for worst-case scenarios. A place at the top to keep watch from, all the weapons they could find, left behind by now dead men. And of course, the sturdy wooden gate keeping them all penned in together like a zoo of fucked up old bastards. 

“One of you, take my place,” Fly slurs, up on the rooftop lookout in his shopping cart, burnt to shit from the sun. “Sick of it up here.”

“Your watch isn’t over yet, man,” Terry reminds him when he passes. Fly flips him off and says something about it, but Terry’s already out of earshot. Of all the people that stayed. 

It’s sort of like a job. Terry’s never worked a day in his life so it’s not like he would know, but there’s jobs for them to do to make sure it’s not just a handful of men sitting around, waiting to die. He knows all about sitting around and waiting to die.

Off to the side of the main building with the rooms, there’s what can only be described as an animal pen. A fenced in area where Rooster keeps his chickens, and another for the only mutant allowed inside the fence. 

“Hey, Queen,” he smiles and climbs over the shoddy fencing keeping her in one area. He thinks it’s a little dehumanizing to treat mutants like animals, especially since this one isn’t even violent, but the others insist to him that it’s just so she doesn’t drag herself into the swamp by accident. 

It’s been a few years since she mutated. He guesses it was around the same time Brad did, but he has no way of knowing. All he knows is that the moment they made it back here, she became this. He’d never seen it happen before his own eyes, and after seeing it here, he’s kind of glad he wasn’t there when it happened to the one he loved. 

Terry sits himself on the edge of her fence with a bottle of alcohol he snagged on today’s outing. Even if she’s not all there, Queen’s company is different and perhaps more important to him than anyone else’s. Maybe he feels bad, for the day when they got here and she had her last living memory being her empty hive, abandoned and hollow like the rest of this failure of a world. So he stays with her when there’s a lot on his mind like this and imagines she appreciates the conversation. The best person to talk to about all this can’t say anything back. That’s something he’s all too familiar with.

He waits for Rooster to clear out of his chicken pen without a single word in passing before he speaks again.

“I saw her today,” he says with his eyes locked on the murky horizon. “The girl.” 

He feels like such a pig for calling her that. That’s what they all called her. Not her name, but the only thing any of them ever cared about.

“Buddy.” 

Brad was careful to not tell anyone anything, and the only information about who they were after came in a blood loss induced haze when Terry finally got it out of him. He just wanted to know that Brad’s intentions weren’t so vile. But it was hard to not have heard her name. Back then, and when word came to them that it wasn’t safe to go past the list. He had heard her name, Rando’s, too. He doesn’t remember much about those few weeks when everything went to hell while they were safely caged up in here. Either he’s getting old or he just doesn’t want to remember the things he heard. 

“Looked like she was doing fine.” He picks at the skin around his fingers with his teeth like he’s nervous about something. Queen jerks a little in the dirt and rumbles something out to him in her own language. He’s always wondered if mutants could talk to each other. If you put a mutated Brad and Queen in a room together would they talk about the weather?

He smiles to himself and takes a drink of alcohol, warm from being left out in the sun. 

“She has a baby.” He mentions to her and feels heavy all over again. A baby. Kids don’t belong out here. Everyone was so obsessed with saving their own futures that they didn’t even take time to think about the world they’d made for the supposed future to live in. There shouldn’t have been a future for Olathe. The flash made that clear.

He sits there on the fence with her for longer than he means to, long enough to see the sky start to go dark above them. Most days are uneventful slogs to the end, and none of them have died yet but he’s worried those funerals are coming closer than he knows. 

“Man,” he sips his alcohol and ignores the tears in his eyes. “When did I become such a downer?”

Queen grunts almost sympathetically at him. Sometimes it’s too coincidental for him to not think she understands him. When she was alive, she was the closest thing to a caregiver he’d ever had. Picked him up when Brad left them and he wanted to just lie there on the shore and die, dragged him back somewhere safe as her last action before mutating. An arm, a life — people need to stop sacrificing shit for him. It’s getting to be too much.

He slams back his whiskey until it’s empty. Things don’t feel any better, though. It only makes him stupider, with stupid notions and feeling like he wants to go see Buddy and Brad again but knowing she told him expressly not to do it often. He can’t make arguments with someone only now getting to make demands for herself. This is all feeling like just another prison of his own making. 

As he’s trying to coax the last few drops of alcohol onto his tongue, footsteps approach and swiftly take the empty bottle from his hand and substitute in a full, unopened one.

“Rest of us are drinking by the fire,” Olan’s already heading back up when Terry looks at him. “You shouldn’t mope down here.”

Terry gives his most halfhearted smile and catches up with him after saying goodbye to Queen. “Nobody calls it moping when  _ you  _ drink.”

“I drink for different reasons.”

Walking so close, Terry can see the wrinkles in his face and knows they mirror his own. They’re not ancient or anything, but they’re deep into middle age and looking worse for wear every day. They keep it in good fun, pointing out grey hairs or crow’s feet for a laugh, but none of them expected the end of their glory days to be spent like this. He knows Olan feels the same because they were both close to Brad in ways most of the others weren’t, and they remember the sense of adventure and budding community between men, all those nights spent around a campfire with just the four of them finding ways to ignore their circumstances. Because people who didn’t at least try to ignore their circumstances became bitter and violent and the kinds of people they didn’t feel bad about killing. Spouting off bullshit about how much action they were gonna get. They were made close by trying to ignore all of this. Terry can feel his ability to do that wavering.

“So, what’d you find?” Olan asks him, stopping their stroll back up to where the others have a fire going.

“Huh?” Terry’s trying to get the cap off the fresh whiskey bottle. 

“Didn’t even say hi when I opened the gate for you.”

He smiles. “That a soft spot of yours? Did I make you feel unappreciated?”

Olan’s smile in return is a familiar one. Terry wishes he didn’t spend so many years dwelling on Brad as his only friend. It’s not fair to him, to any of them. “Just wondering what’s on your mind.”

The playful tone dries up from Terry’s voice when he remembers what’s on his mind. “i, um,” he swallows thickly and tries to remember that he’s talking to someone he can trust. “I saw the...the girl. Buddy.”

Terry can’t see most of his expression from under the brim of his hat, just hears him whistle in vague astonishment. “Still around, huh.”

“She’s got a baby. And Brad. And she’s all...scarred up and different, she tried to kill me-“

“Easy.” Olan calms him down, holding up his hand to get him to stop talking. “Let’s just head up there. We’ll talk about it later.”

Terry wants to argue that he wants to talk about it  _ now _ , but he really doesn’t and maybe Olan can tell. He’s spent the whole day sitting on a fence post thinking about everything until nothing made sense anymore. A drink by the fire is probably for the better.

Most of them are there, save for the ones that don’t drink — Rooster’s as clean-cut as a guy can get about this stuff, and they make it a point to not let Jack have any on account of being the youngest and the least likely of them to die in a couple years. The rest of them are there around the fire with drinks in hand. Terry wonders what they’ll do when the alcohol supply fully runs out. Start making their own out of swamp water, maybe.

They take their spots in the group, and Terry is reminded of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. The sights and sounds of his reality are no different than they were no matter how old he gets. Nern’s in the middle of a story when they get there, and so mercifully restarts it so they don’t feel left out. A background noise of a one-stringed guitar plucking along to nothing, the sound of one-sides squabbling and drunken nonsense, his friends by the fire in the plodding pace of their lives now that they are the only society they will be a part of when they all die. A quiet acceptance of their end, together.

Terry can’t help but feel that bringing Buddy here would brighten things up, and he mostly trusts everyone here to be on their best behavior about it, to put it very lightly. They could unite in more than just the mutual feeling of being the washed-up visions of stronger men they were back when Olathe was still alive. Raise that baby together, give it as good a life as any baby could get in the apocalypse. 

He smiles and wipes tears out of his eyes before they fall.

Yeah. That would be really nice. 


	4. Weight

For the next few months, once every two weeks, Terry visits Brad like they agreed.

Buddy doesn’t always make a point of watching them; sometimes she’s not even there for it. When she does see them, Terry looks like this is completely normal. Talking to Brad, rambling off lists of things she can’t hear and basking with him in the hot sun until it’s time for him to go home. She never wants to know what he’s saying. It toes the line between pathetic and uncomfortable. They don’t know the same man. To hear Terry speak to the Brad he knows would be sad and confusing, and she doesn’t need anymore sad and confusing.

There’s much more important things to worry about, anyway.

The baby’s growing bigger and almost too heavy to carry in the sling around her chest. The thought of leaving him alone in such an uncertain world during her scavenging sends her into fits of worry that last all night. 

There’s a family of birds with patches of plucked feathers, living up in a tree near Dusty’s grave. A mother and three babies, and she can leave them every morning and come back with all her babies still there. 

Buddy and her baby are not birds. She’s not built with the same instincts, the ways her son grows just on a day-to-day basis confuses and scares her. They’d taught her ad nauseum about what her purpose was and how it would happen, but they never taught her about the aftermath. Maybe they expected her baby to be born only to be handed off to someone in charge to be raised however the future of Olathe was meant to be raised. Probably in a basement somewhere.

That seems too generous. They never really cared about the baby as much as they cared about her. She knows why.

The baby’s starting to teach himself how to crawl now. Not quite there yet, but creeping along as best he can before his little body gives up on it fir the day. She’s there with him after a scavenging, watching him teeter on his chubby little hands, pushing himself up and looking around until he sees her and smiles. She smiles, too. She may not have the instincts to know what’s best, but her love for this bizarre little gift outweighs that. The first baby she’s ever seen is hers, and maybe that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. 

It’s been so long since she was trapped down there. Sometimes she remembers how long it’s truly been since the fallout of everything. She lies down in the dirt next to the baby, who’s tired from learning to crawl and has quieted down to a contented nap at her side.

It feels like there hasn’t been a moment to breathe. Like she thinks about this every day but never comes to any sort of conclusion about it. She looks at her hands, up against the backdrop of the endless sky. There’s a weight that never goes away, and she’s taken it to be her lot in life, that even if Brad hadn’t been the one to take care of her, she would still never get an easy, painless ride. 

The difficult truth is that she doesn’t know who she is without that weight. She can’t remember the little girl who liked painting pictures when one of her uncles came back with acrylic paints from a time before her, a little girl who saw flowers and the sky and thought they were the most amazing things this world had to offer. She digs into her pocket and pulls it out — the long dead corpse of a flower that had always stayed somehow since the day she and Brad found it walking together. Those memories are grey and distant, the flower is nothing more than a stem with what used to be a flower hanging onto it for dear life. How fitting.

She stands up from the ground and looks over to Brad’s corner of the property outside the fence. They’re having one of their visits today. 

It’s hard to remember good times with Brad, or see him now as more than that mindless ton of flesh and blood. She wonders what she would look like now if she’d rejected the vaccine, and if things would be better if she had. In honesty, the world would be no different now if she was a monster. All those men would still be dead, Olathe would still be nothing more than dry, sandy dirt and empty homes full of relics from a forgotten time. What she has done is permanent. She doesn’t remember what it’s like to not exist with her head and heart heavy and burdened down with the weight that’s been hers since the day she was born.

She takes her baby as gingerly as she can into her arms and climbs over the fence towards the mutant and the man clinging to something that never was his. 

Maybe she can get some insight.

She stands a few feet away from them. Terry’s leaning on Brad with his cheek to the crown of Brad’s head and looking off at nothing until he sees her coming. 

“Hey.” Is all he says. Less astonished by the sight of her than he was before. He hasn’t seen her since that initial first meeting, and it’s on purpose. She doesn’t want to get so used to being around someone again. Truthfully, she doesn’t know why she’s here with him now. A need to understand, maybe. She’s always been called curious and it’s always been a bad thing.

She doesn’t say anything back to him. Just lets him find his own words.

“Oh, I brought you some stuff,” he says, then rummages through his bag and slides her a smaller sack that’s just a bit heavy in her hands. She opens it and it’s stuffed full of food rations, bottles of clean water, and underneath it all, what looks to be a small toy, a dingy stuffed rabbit. 

“The bunny’s clean,” he smiles when he sees her turn it over in her hands like she’s never seen a stuffed animal before in her life. “A member of the haven used it for his magic act, but we agreed the baby would like it more. Consider it a thank-you for not...killing me, last time.” 

Buddy looks at the thing with a dull ache of sadness in her heart. The baby has no toys. One of the few things she remembers from being a kid is that kids like toys. Brad and her uncles never did manage to find her any real toys from the time before, but she would play with objects like they  _ were  _ toys, tin cups and empty bottles and stones. This was a real thing that some child would have played with decades ago. It’s white fur is dull and matted but its little black eyes and nose are still stitched into its face. She feels like crying.

“...Thanks.” Is all she can manage. 

“Anytime. Anything you need, just, y’know, let me know and I’ll try to find it for you, okay?” 

She turns the toy over in her shaky hands a few more times before stuffing it back in the bag with the rations. When she thinks about the childhood she lost to this world, it’s all she can do to not break down in anger. So much was robbed from her for nothing. Nothing could’ve saved Olathe. Especially not her. “You don’t need to do that.”

“I want to.”

Her hands don’t stop shaking. An anger quickly fills her, because this type of kindness has never been without ulterior motives. What does he want? To take her back to civilization so she can be the savior of Olathe again? To worm his way into her life because he misses Brad and she’s the closest thing to him, or because he wants to make it up to a man that’s been mentally gone for years because he feels guilty and sorry for them despite never being a part of this story in the first place? This isn’t normal. She doesn’t want this, this piousness and his pity and his guilt. Getting her guard down. Everyone out here is such a filthy, filthy liar. Bad faith actors and charlatans. 

“Don’t.” Her voice is hoarse with rage and a pain deeper than he could ever know. “I don’t want this.”

Terry sits up, preparing to plead with her to accept his deceitful charity. She doesn’t let him get a word in.

“You’re not going to convince me to leave, I don’t want your trash.” It doesn’t matter if she means it. She needs to protect herself before anything else, before this gets out of hand. 

Terry furrows his brow in confusion or hurt, and she wants to relent and just let him leave on his own accord and without scaring him away, but it’s too much. So much more than she knows how to deal with. “I’m not trying to make you leave.”

He’s so calm and keeping up with this altruistic facade, it only makes her angrier. Makes her want to cut in deep. 

“Why are you here?” She seethes, taking a step forward and clutching the baby tight to her chest. “Brad is  _ dead _ .” Always eager to make her look stupid, Brad grunts and looks up at her like he understands his own name. “He’s not gonna remember you, he’s fucking  _ dead _ .” She wants to cut him to the core without killing him. She doesn’t want him dead, just wants him to give up whatever he’s trying to do here. Things were hard enough when he wasn’t around.

Terry’s eyes are always wet and sad, it’s so hard to tell what he feels. “I know that,” he picks himself up on shaking, aging knees. “Do you think I don’t know that?” 

She doesn’t know what to think. She takes a step back and puts her hand on the hilt of the sword at her hip, because she knows he’s getting flustered about it and knows that that confusion always turns into anger. Terry backs off, they both back off and she wishes she felt okay with just slitting his throat so she doesn’t have to think about all this, but the frenzied high and thrill of the hunt is something she left in her past, along with the joy. She doesn’t want this man to die. She doesn’t want to ever have to kill again. But it feels like the only way to deal with the problems he causes is to put him out of this misery that seems to run in the family. Brad carried that misery with him, and decided that so would she.

“You,” she manages after a long standoff, her mouth dry. “You need to leave.” 

She’s expecting Terry to get mad and try something stupid that warrants his death, but everything around them is calm except for her. Before he can say anything back, it is Buddy who leaves, retreating back to the prison of her own making where it’s always been safe. 

It’s hard to remember the last time she cried. There’s only the feeling of wanting to, but she doesn’t think she’s really capable of it anymore. She sets the baby down on his back and he’s still sleeping. She drops her stuff onto the ground and the gifts from Terry are still there. She never really wanted to refuse them. Her heart is, as always, heavy in her chest when she reaches in and takes out the stuffed rabbit. It’s soft and smiling despite its age. Good for a baby. She gingerly tucks it into her son’s sleeping arms and once again feels the threat of tears, but no more than that. If Terry’s gone, she didn’t hear him go. The world is still again, but the turmoil inside her never really goes away. 

She curls up next to him on the ground and tries to will herself into sleep right alongside him. It’s never so easy. With her finger, she draws the clouds she sees as they pass in the dirt until she falls into another fitful sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey so i felt like I should clarify a few things
> 
> -in this fic and by my own headcanon, brad did not kill any party members like in the game. I see that as a hallucination because it hurts and also i cant rationalize how they would’ve gotten to rando land without a boat in the first place
> 
> -the lisa timeline confuses me so for clarity we’ll just say buddy was 13 during joyful, now shes about 17-18 so its been 5 years. 
> 
> -i do headcanon queen as using she/her pronouns. I mean, obviously but just clearing that up 
> 
> Think that’s everything. Really happy people seem to be enjoying this one, its a big step out of my comfort zone as a writer but I’m glad I did it. Your guys’ kind words keep me writing at the pace that i am, so thank you so much for leaving nice things for me to see! If you wanna talk or send fanworks maybe (please please please) you can reach me on tumblr or twitter (@ hottestdance for both). The lisa community is so small id really be hype to talk to some of you about it if you’re into that kind of thing ^^! 
> 
> Anyway, I really appreciate all the feedback and hope you guys like the rest!! Tysm for reading.


	5. Idealist

The visits between Terry and Brad don’t stop, despite the tensions she established. Buddy can’t tell if that’s relieving or infuriating, but life goes on like that for a while and she’s not doing anything to stop it. She thinks maybe she just doesn’t have that same fight left in her anymore.

His visits get more frequent, so not only was he not scared off by her frustrated jeers, he’s emboldened by them. He still never invades her space, and is gone after an hour each time, so it stays. A new constant in a life with none. 

The baby starts to crawl during one of those visits. She’s sitting with him, cooking their food for the next few days when he pushes himself up on his shaking arms like a baby deer and crawls to her side. This means he will be harder to leave alone, she doesn’t like doing it to begin with, but there are so many ways for a baby to become hurt out here. 

She looks over the fence to where the visits always happen since Brad never moves. Months have gone by, and he has not approached her about relocating her since the first time. Has not made any indication that he’s bothered by her presence at all. There are no reasons to either trust or distrust him other than self-preservation and not getting too used to his company. But if his company isn’t going away, that hardly matters.

In fact, it doesn’t matter at all.

She picks the baby up, balances him on her hip since he’s, as expected, too heavy now for his makeshift carrier. He gurgles and clings to his stuffed rabbit. They’ve been inseparable since she put it in his arms that day.

She hops the fence expertly, not even snagging her clothes because this is the only way into her home and she’s climbed it every day since her new normal.

Today’s scavenging goes in the opposite direction of Terry and the mutant. Give them their privacy.

——-

Olathe has remained suspended in time for five years. The only things that go disturbed are the things she finds use in. Men were uprooted for their homes, headed farther east so fast they left behind the lives they’d built in caves and dirt huts and tents along the road. She’s not worried about anyone seeing her out and about, with a baby and without a mask. People only pass through Olathe to get to the next place, it is a mere highway of what used to be a thriving settlement. She still thinks it’s all deserved. 

There being nothing left after she goes through a ghost town picking up what’s left, scavenges are mostly reserved for hunting. It’s only gotten harder with the baby, but thankfully, Olathe is a dry and choked desert with animals that drop dead all the time. She was told once that when the world changed, all of it changed. Including the environment, including the animals. They had to adapt from the green grass and clean rivers to dry dirt and toxic water. While mankind struggled with the change, nature had found a way as it always did. So there are plenty of animals, they own this land now, and there’s plenty of them that pass on every day. She’s thankful that deer aren’t the sentimental type that bury each other when they die, because she’d starve if they were.

That’s mostly what she looks for. Occasionally she needs to pump water and hope for good results, but only about one bottle for every five is drinkable. She’ll take it — she  _ needs  _ to take it. It’s all there is anymore.

Sometimes she stumbles on something she didn’t know was there, hidden rations or a secret passage in abandoned homes where men hid their booze or hoarded rations. And of course, their joy. The Olathian man’s best friend, and his murderer. She’s lying if she says she doesn’t miss it, lying still if she says she’d do it again. It’s not like she can just find another miracle cure. A few years, maybe one or two after she quit the stuff, the withdrawals finally kicked in once her body decided it missed it. Those were painful and sickly days full of nightmares and vomiting. Back then, she didn’t even have the baby to keep her sane and feeling like there was a reason for all this. That little blue pill made it all go away, but she never accounted for the fact that it would all come back. 

Of course, the things that had no choice but to stay are always here. She’s never viewed the mutants as her children, like that coward did. They’re just fucked up side effects of a fucked up world that were planned into existence but live completely aimlessly. There’s a familiar one, draped over a ledge and dripping his drool onto the dirt below with its glassy eyes only focusing on her for a second as she passes, then returning to their perpetual distant stare. Some are more active, limping down the empty roads like they’re on their way to somewhere important. Creatures of pity. She remembers the first mutant she ever saw, running away from Brad with Rick and Sticky. It scared her. Its jaw was dislocated all the way to its chest in an expression of agony and its white, bloodshot eyes begged for help. She had clung to Rick a little tighter as they ran, he told her it was okay and that they couldn’t be scared right now even though he sounded so scared. She’d never found out what happened to him by the end. Maybe, by some miracle, he managed to make it out of all of this alive.

She’s brought out of her thoughts by the feeling of raindrops on her skin, three or four until it’s coming down hard and fast on them. She looks up into the sky and lets it wash over her like it’s washing away everything in her head, all the burdens on her shoulders. It’s not, nothing can, but it feels almost cleansing.

The baby fusses in her arms in annoyance from the droplets hitting his head..

“Shit,” she hurries to cover his head, removing her poncho to cover him up as best she can, then starts back on the way home.

———

She returns home, gets the baby under the roof of her tent, but the rain stopped before they got there. There are tin pots, cups she has sitting out to catch water if it rains. So, there’s the water problem solved for a few days. 

The air is humid and suffocating as she climbs back over the fence, wringing her hair free of rainwater. Thunder still booms somewhere distant, but it’s moving away from them. Her corner of the wasteland is silent once again.

She stops in front of Terry, who’s clearly been rained on, throws him a towel made from old, scavenged clothes as a sign of good will and pity, then turns around to go back home.

“Hey,” he says from behind her.

She sighs. Her fault for thinking the towel was a good enough gesture to get him to stop asking her questions or trying to give her things. She pities him, she really does. Sitting out in the rain for some monster that he can’t cope with, so he talks to it like it’s still human. She’s past hating him. If he’s not going away and he’s not going to attack her or press the issue of leaving any further, then he’s fine. He doesn’t matter anymore.

“Sit with me for a minute.”

Buddy looks back and down at him with her suspicion made clear by her face. If he ruins what amicable indifference they’ve cultivated, that’s on him. 

“The baby.” She states like it’s obvious. If no men are out here trying to get him, then coyotes are. 

Terry smiles a little and shrugs. “Bring him, too.” 

That’s how they come to be sitting next to each other after a rainstorm, baby in her arms and the man she once knew as a father dozing off as rain dries from his skin in front of them. Maybe she still feels second-hand shame for how dedicated Terry is to coming here, maybe there’s just nothing else to do. 

They’re quiet for a long time before Terry starts up a conversation.

“Have you ever seen it happen?” He doesn’t look at her, just straight ahead at Brad. “Mutation, I mean.”

She thinks back to Buzzo. The way his speech became incoherent before his body started twisting and contorting horrifically and he didn’t even seem in pain from it, for he was laughing the whole time. 

“Yes.”

Terry nods in solemn understanding. “Me too.” He gently scratches his hands into Brad’s beard like scratching an animal’s fur. “Was it him?”

“No. Someone else.” She didn’t see Brad at all after running away from him that one last time. She had been so tired, her heart so burdened down by the things she had seen and done, that she ran to the nearest shelter and fell asleep before she hit the ground. “Who did you see?”

The man next to her sighs and runs a hand over his tired, weathered face. “A friend.” Just as much vagueness as her. She guesses when you see that sort of thing, a lot about you changes. It’s not something you want to recount. Buzzo was not her friend. He had not been kind to her, he used her as a bargaining chip in the sick game he was playing with Brad. But she hadn’t been the one to kill him. He ate himself alive until all the blood he’d lost slipped him into a sobbing, laughing death at the hands of himself. A lot of men out here were their own downfall. She didn’t even need to help them.

“You ever thought about what it’s like?” He asks her, finally turning his head so they’re looking at each other. When she looks at Terry, she sees a broken man well past his prime, chasing the past in ways that will never satisfy him. She wonders what he sees when he looks at her. A killer past her own prime, maybe. “To be like them.”

She has thought about that. It’s hard not to when she had been so close to it herself. “Yes.” 

“Me too.” He gives her a sad smile, then turns his attention on the baby, hesitantly reaching out to touch his head. When Buddy doesn’t pull away, he gently ruffles his hair and smiles a little bit more genuinely. “Bet he’s happy you’re not, though.” The baby coos at him and reaches for his hand. She doesn’t know why she’s okay with letting Terry be so familiar with the only thing she has. Just that she’s exhausted thinking about it to the point where it doesn’t really matter anymore. 

Another question crosses her mind, looking into the dark, vacant eyes of the mutant in front of them. “Why did you…” it’s a heavy question like a gun in her hand. She knows that because it’s just as heavy for her to ask as it will be for him to answer. “Why did you like him so much? Brad.”

“He’s the first person that’s ever cared about me.” Terry doesn’t even have to think about his answer. That frustrates her to no end. 

“That’s it?” Brad cared about her, too. She’s sure Brad cared about a lot of people. It’s easy to think he never really cared about her because she wants the version of him in her head to be one easily disregarded, but he cared so much about her that he killed half of Olathe, left the other half for her. But it never made him a good person. It never made any of this worth it.

“That’s it,” he says with a resigned shrug. “I know he wasn’t perfect, but...nobody really can be out here.”

That’s a piss-poor excuse for what she’s gone through, but he doesn’t know what she’s gone through. So she stays quiet and lets him talk.

“He really loved you, Buddy.” 

She doesn’t think that’s his place to decide. 

But she knows he’s right. It just hurts. There are times when she thinks she’s come to terms with it all, and she can die tomorrow thinking she knows the man that raised her and forgives him for doing it wrong, but those moments leave just as much as they arrive, so she doesn’t really know what she thinks at all. There is no peace, no rest from it. She’s grown now, so why does she feel like that child, in the dark about everything and fighting just to get out into the light? 

“I know.”

“I wish it wasn’t like this,” Terry pulls his knees close to his chest to make himself smaller. He does that a lot, she’s noticed. “Guess it doesn’t matter how much I wish for it. Do you know what ‘idealism’ is?”

She shakes her head. 

“It’s, like, you see things as how they should be, even if they’re not like that. You think you can change the world and stuff. And when all this shit started, I thought people would still find a way to be good as much as they could be, and I didn’t, y’know, talk to anyone but I imagined it, I guess,” 

His voice breaks every other word like he’s going to cry, but never does.

“Then I started hanging around Brad, and I saw everyone act like a bunch of rabid animals, and I saw the posters they put up with your face on it and you were just a little girl, and all these guys were being disgusting over a little girl.”

Buddy’s throat tightens at his words. 

“And I thought, I thought we would save you, like, we’d rescue you from these creeps, but we couldn’t even save ourselves so what the hell were we doing trying to save you? I kinda lost faith in the world and people after that. Not immediately, but I did. And y’know, who am I to judge them? Sometimes I look at us back at the haven and think man, are we all that’s left?”

It’s hard not to share that sentiment. She wishes the savior of Olathe could be someone that actually wanted to save it in the first place.

Terry heaves out a sigh, done with his rambling. “Sorry. I bet you don’t wanna hear any of that.”

She thinks the rain might be falling again, but it’s only her own tears dripping onto her bare hand. 

It’s too much. It feels like someone’s sitting on her chest, like she’s dying. 

“I need to go.” She stands up before Terry can look at her and be worried.

Everything she has gone through, everything humanity has gone through, it was all just moves in an unwilling game not being played by her, or by any of them. She can’t tell Terry that his optimism was killed because someone wanted to be god. That Dusty, and her uncles, and everyone else who didn’t deserve it, were dead now because they were part of a game that ended with everyone killing themselves and each other over her. This baby in her arms will grow up in a wasteland with nothing to eat or drink and nowhere to play and nobody to play with, and he will blame her and he will hate her and she will have deserved it because her entire purpose was to make things hateful and dead.

The rain starts up again when she gets back home. If only it could wash her away from this.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hii sorry for the 1 day break, needed some time to get caught up
> 
> Hope you guys are enjoying so far, comments are always really appreciated, and you can still get in contact with me on my twitter or tumblr (hottestdance for both) if you want a more direct line to me, but your comments are always enough ofc ^^ ❤️  
> thanks so much for reading!!


	6. Scars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for descriptions of violence and blood and brief discussions of infant sickness

Two days later, the baby gets sick.

She resisted panicking over it for the first couple days. If she panicked, there would’ve been no time to do something about it, which she tried to do. Desperately racking her mind for memories of being sick as a child and what had been done for her then. She remembers being sick once, distantly, when she was around four years old. There are no memories of what she was given to help the pain stop, all she remembers is a panicked Brad and sleeping for a long time before it was over, and he’d held her and cried and she didn’t know why. That doesn’t help anything. But maybe it helps to know that it’s normal for a parent to worry and cry over their child before they even know what’s wrong.

His skin is so warm, too warm for comfort. Crying almost every time he takes a breath, not latching when it’s time to eat. And all she knows about that is that it’s not normal, and the situation they’re in is so dire that a baby being sick out here, where there’s no medicine and no time for her to go out to find food or supplies at risk of something going wrong while she’s away, he might not live through it if it gets to be too bad.

Her heart aches every time he cries. She has the most patient and happy baby in the world despite the circumstances — he rarely cries, or he rarely cried before this. Now, he’s in pain. And she barely knows how to help her own pain, so how is she supposed to help him? This day had to come eventually. There’s no place for a baby out here, she doesn’t know how she thought this could ever have worked longer than it already has. 

It’s a miserable few days as she waits for him to get better. No sleep for either of them, and supplies are getting too low for comfort. She’s considered just weathering it out with him until it’s over, but it’s consistent and by the end of the week, it’s clear something must be done.

Her familiarity with Terry being in her life is a problem because one of the first solutions she comes up with is to go crying to the only adult she knows, who’s been alive longer than her and maybe knows something about what she is and isn’t supposed to be doing to help him, but his last visit was only a few days ago, and he knows not to come around more often than he already is. And the next time he comes around, it might be too late.

She’s stuck in a dead-end situation that might end in the only thing she has being taken from her. It’s all too familiar of a feeling. 

The baby finally drifts off into sleep and it’s taking everything to not collapse right there next to him. If only she and this child could sleep for a hundred years, sleep through this life and be free of all this. But they can’t. Because that kind of thinking will get both of them killed. 

She regroups with herself. With a moment to think, she weighs her options. To wait it out and let whatever this is take its course can end in either things going back to normal, or her child not making it to his first birthday. Waiting it out isn’t an option. 

The baby fusses in his sleep while she thinks. She hates him being here. Having to be the future of a world that’s not made for him. She wonders how babies born just before the flash survived, what their miserable fathers must have done to keep them here on this earth when there were no mothers to nurse them, no doctors to see them. She thinks about that sometimes, about the babies born just in time to be raised in a world like this. They couldn’t have been too much older than her, if they did, in fact, live through this. 

Hell. If someone like Brad could do it, maybe anyone could. 

But she’s sick of making her choices based on what the men in her life would do. She’s not going to stand around and panic and hope for things to get better. That’s never been a sustainable option when circumstances did everything they could to not make it better, but make it worse. 

Something’s going to have to change.

She holds him close to her, occasionally running her fingers through his hair when he squirms or threatens to wake up. It hurts. Not even sleep is peaceful for him. Sleep Isn't peaceful for her either, but she remembers when it was and that’s all she’s ever wanted for this kid, to be able to sleep soundly at night like she no longer can.

She tries to think of a tune, a soothing song to hum to put him at ease, but she doesn’t know any. So she resolves to just talk to him in as friendly a voice as she can manage. She’s not friendly, though.

“I still don’t know your name,” she confesses, her voice no more than a whisper to keep him sleeping and away from all this. “I thought it’d come to me by now.” She thinks about her own name. How it had just been a nervously affectionate word from a nervously affectionate man that had become her name, the one thing she knew could identify her other than all the bloodshed she’d caused. Who was she? Beyond the last girl left alive, beyond the person who killed their way up the list. 

She likes to draw. She never has time for it anymore, but she remembers seeing the clouds and the dead trees around the old house for the first time and wanting to put them on paper so she could see them forever, even when she wasn’t allowed outside. That doesn’t seem like enough, though. All she feels is numb and bitter, so that must be everything she is. All she can do is hope it’s not hereditary. She wants this kid to grow up, realize he can do much better somewhere else, and become someone who feels deeper and feels more than numbness, bitterness, and violence. 

If he grows up at all.

She wrenches her eyes closed and tells herself to shut up over and over in her head until she thinks about something else. 

In an effort to escape those thoughts, she leaves the tent and goes looking around the home for something to do that’s not worrying about something out of her control. Her eyes settle on a stack of miscellaneous, smaller supplies that aren’t for building or surviving. She hates to admit being so impractical, but a hobby of hers, if you can call it that, is occasionally picking up relics from the past. Stuff that won’t keep them alive, but stuff she takes for some reason or another. It’s hidden behind pieces of scrap wood and food rations because she’s ashamed of it, because it doesn’t matter.

She approaches it and reminds herself of all the times she couldn’t keep from stealing a dead man’s personal possessions. 

One man made decorations for his home out of sticks and twine. She stole a few. They mean nothing to her. But the man who they meant something to is either dead or gone. 

In one house, she found a necklace and matching earrings. The only reason she knows what those are is from magazines (the tamer ones, anyway) advertising stuff for the women of the past, pretty and smooth figures that she would never be able to know. She thinks the man of that house was holding onto these for sentimental reasons, that a woman he loved might’ve owned them at some point. Sentimental nonsense not important enough to be taken with him if he left. So she took it.

Then there was all the art supplies she stole. She confesses that she took one of Terry’s papers that first time they’d met, scattered from his bag in an attempt to prove he wasn’t a threat. She grabs one, then grabs a similarly stolen pencil from the heap, and sits down with it.

She’s a bundle of nerves and fears right now, but there’s no point in sitting around waiting for something to happen. This is okay, for now.

She thinks of the Olathe she never knew. It’s hard not to with all this hoarded bullshit from the time before. She thinks of Dusty, what he said it had been like. His childhood and those green fields and rivers where kids used to play. Green grass for her is rare, and all the rivers are dirty and muddy brown and sometimes toxic. 

She closes her eyes and imagines what it looks like, and tries to sketch it out on the yellowed paper. And she isn’t an artist, nowhere close to it, but she feels almost close to him when she thinks about the childhood he told her about, who he was and how that was all he wanted for her, was to be a kid while she still could and leave the logistics of being the last woman up to the future. His grave is nearby, marked by his mask so she always remembers where he’s resting. It’s easy to say he doesn’t cross her mind at least once every day, it’s harder to make that the truth. In the world she’s drawing, his childhood, she wishes she could’ve been there with him. His little sister, children of a world that could sustain them and nurture them. And he wouldn’t have ended up in a ditch with barbed wire cutting up his skin and his skull broken and bleeding against the rocks of the place he grew up in.

She wipes tears from her eyes before they fall onto the paper and ruin her sketch. It’s not fair. None of it’s fair. She forgave him a long time ago for his lies, for the kidnapping. But he’d died thinking she never would forgive him for it. Nothing’s fair, nothing’s easy. It still hurts even when she remembers that it’s never been that way. She misses something she never had, so, so dearly.

Suddenly, a crashing sound rips her from thought. She whips her head back towards the sound to see a mutant, twisted and violent, thrashing against the rocks around her home with a ferocity she’s only seen in a handful of creatures like it.

Most of them are like Brad, stagnant and too burdened by their own flesh and their peculiar bodies to move more than a couple feet before they’re winded and tired. But there’s been a few like this, creatures pissed off by their own existence and eager to find something to thrash around like prey.

She drops what she’s doing and remains as still as she can, cursing herself for getting lazy with the trumpet. Something about it puts them at ease, and clearly this one must have needed it. Her first thought is to run for the baby, but that might draw it to them and the risk towards the kid is enough to keep her put. Her sword is stabbed into the earth nearby, but not near enough to grab from where she is. And the trumpet is near the tent, where the baby is.

Fuck.

She watches as it gets dangerously close, snarling and thrashing its body into anything it can. Brad is the least of her worries, but she wonders if mutants have the need to fight with each other, like animals fighting for a mate. Brad wouldn’t stand a chance against this thing.

It’s sniffing around, growling, everything you could ask of a predator searching for its prey. She refuses to be its prey. She has, and will always be, the apex predator of this godforsaken earth. That’s all she needs to think to steel her nerves. This won’t end, not in this way. Not without a fight at the very least. If she dies, she just hopes the baby lives long enough for someone to hear him and save him, someone good. 

She knows from experience that joy changes you. Makes you strong and enhances everything about you, even your eyesight. It crosses her mind that it might smell her rations, or her. When it manages to break through the fence, tearing the barbed wire in its teeth, she knows this can’t continue. It won’t.

She picks herself up and lunges for her sword, pulling it up from the ground. It knows she’s moving before she can get on her feet and ready to fight it, already pushing itself up on scarred, powerful legs. It’s impossible to get the trumpet fast enough, this thing already has its sights set. 

She missed this. She  _ needed  _ this. These things don’t inherently deserve to die, but peace isn’t an option either. Not without the trumpet.

Buddy makes the first move, walking around it and making it follow her so it can’t go deeper into her camp, her home. She braces her hands on the sword and gathers the adrenaline she needs to push down the implicit, human fear of something so unnatural, then charges it, practically pushing off the ground in a mad sprint with her eyes locked on the beast’s throat. 

It crashes through anything in its way like it’s got a personal vendetta, knocking over everything it can with a vengeance. The baby’s more than certainly awake by now, and she feels sympathy for him but can’t take her attention away from this. 

The mutant picks up speed and charges at her with a type of guttural war cry that might’ve been what it sounded like back when it was still a man. It’s kicking up so much dust in its fury that everything’s cloaked in a dingy brown fog like smoke at a crash site. She grits her teeth, braces herself, and swipes for it, feeling a familiar pride and ecstasy when she feels her blade make contact with flesh, dragging it along until there’s no more flesh to cut. It screams and recoils but doesn’t fully back off. She looks up and finds out she only grazed its upper chest. Before she can move, it swipes at her with its arm, digging sharp nails into her arm and dragging it down until there’s no more, just like her with her blade. She bites back a pained sound until it turns into a frustrated grunt, and steels herself for another hit. She can feel the blood dripping down the side of her arm as she goes for another hit. Times like this, she misses the manic, vengeful girl hopped up on joy and alcohol and feeling nothing every time she sank her blade into a man’s chest. 

But there’s no time to think about the person she gave up when she gave up joy, so with a fierce cry from the pain and the primal need to protect everything she has, she digs her feet into the dirt and drives the sword deep into the throat of the intruder.

It gives a pained screech and violently kicks her away, sending her on her back with the wind knocked out of her. Scrambling back to her feet, she watches as it thrashes and kicks like it’s fighting off death itself, the mutant makes it a point to kick over more supplies in its frantic writhing before it eventually grinds to a halt and slumps dead onto the ground, dust and debris falling around it. 

An incredibly quick end for something so hellbent on destruction. Not quick enough to keep her from becoming its casualty apparently. As the adrenaline wears off, she shakily throws her sword to the ground and collapses with it to assess the damage, lifting up her poncho and hesitantly checking the wound left by its swipe.

“Fuck,” she hisses, gritting her teeth and pressing her hand in the wound to temporarily halt the blood. Four parallel slashes, not unlike the ones she sustained over her eye all that time ago. Deep and long, resembling a human’s claw marks but not quite. They’re too big to be human. And it’s not like she’s unexperienced with damages like this, she’s sustained them consistently since the moment she got out, but this is considerably more serious than shallow claw marks over the eye, or a severed nipple. It needs stitches. She doesn’t fucking know how to do stitches.

Great.

On shaking legs, she stumbles to some of the more important supplies that were thankfully not crushed under the weight of the now dead mutant before her, bandages and gauze that have gone untouched since the day she found them because with no men and no mutants to threaten her, injuries became a rarity. Her fault for getting lazy with the stupid trumpet, she guesses. 

The most she can do is wrap the wound in gauze until it at least somewhat hides the gashes. This isn’t viable, and there’s a deep panic in her because she knows it’s not. 

When the ringing in her ears stops, she hears the baby wailing for her attention and rushes to him, taking him into her arms as best she can and being careful not to get any blood on his clean, soft skin. 

She’s shaking, he’s shaking, and everything feels like it’s falling apart again like it hasn’t in so long. The perpetual numbness in her heart aches and begs her to break down and let this be her end, but that’s impossible. It feels the same way it did when she was a kid. She can get as cold and steel-hearted as she desires to protect herself from all of these stacking threats, but she still has never been allowed or able to grow up. She can’t even cry right now. It won’t help.

The baby’s wailing quiets to a sick and painful little whimper, clinging onto her blood-stained poncho for dear life.

It’s right in front of her now; the choice she needs to make.

Stay here and die, or get out and perhaps die slower. It’s a hit to her pride to go searching for help, but it’s clear by now that circumstance doesn’t care about her pride.

She does her best to feed him. She grabs the trumpet, sheathes her sword into a holster at her side. Takes him into her arms and stands, regaining her stability in a stubborn effort to no longer shake and stumble from the pain.

The dust has settled. It’s time to go.

  
  



	7. Care

Terry hasn’t been able to sleep lately. Sleep’s never come easy to him in the first place, his mind never shuts up when it needs to. Back when he went around with Brad, they’d be the last two awake every night and Terry would wonder if they shared the same kind of demons, those restless thoughts, and the feeling that something very bad would happen if you fell asleep. They bonded over it. Terry heard Brad say more in those sleepless nights than he ever had when they were on the move again. It made him feel special. They felt close.

No such conversation for him here. Come morning, he picks himself up off the floor of his room and ends his sleepless nights by starting the day. 

They all manage to wake up around the same time after years of setting their internal clocks to work with the agreed-upon rules and shifts they have to take at the haven. Really there’s only being on lookout and making dinner (usually a very bland but filling kind of thrown-together soup), but there are things to do to keep yourself busy. Usually through alcohol.

Terry leaves his room, puts on his best smiling face to greet the day, and climbs the rope to the upper levels to see what everyone’s up to today. It’s interesting, like the people-watching he used to do in the early days of the flash when he had nobody and couldn’t endear himself to a group well enough to stay in it for more than a day and a night. 

It’s a nice day. Sun’s out but not beating down too hard, nice breeze, nice all around. He takes a deep breath and rights himself from the night before. Sometimes he feels like the captain of a ship, keeping it together for the rest of his crew and putting on a brave face even when he doesn’t feel very brave at all.

Sometimes he just feels like a loser.

He greets them as he sees them, hoping the dark circles around his eyes aren’t too dark, hoping everyone is still on board with all this even though he has no reason to think they’re planning to leave or something. Buff’s on lookout, Rooster’s with his chickens, Yazan with his cat. Olan’s doing target practice with his arrows — seems redundant to practice something you’re already perfect at, but, whatever keeps him busy— some guys sit in the grass out front, some guys are still in their rooms, and Queen’s where she always is, in her own corner of the fortress. It’s important for them all to keep busy when being stagnant means thinking about everything a little too much. Terry misses blissful ignorance almost more than he misses modern society.

He sets his sights on the couple guys congregated in the grass out front, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey, chatting amongst themselves. Terry feels like he should join them, like conversation is important now more than ever to him. If he doesn’t watch himself, he’ll be locked in his room dwelling on the past and shutting everyone out like they’re not as important to him as someone who’s no longer really alive. If he stays in his head too long, the Lord of Hints will rear his ugly head and take back over. Nobody here needs the Lord of Hints. Terry doesn’t want him. He sits down on the grass.

“—I do my best work when I’m hammered, I swear,” Terry catches them mid-conversation, Garth speaking over a bottle of liquor and a crudely drawn portrait of a naked woman. A stick figure with tits. “You should trade me some rations for these.”

Fly, lounging in his shopping cart, scoffs. “I wouldn’t trade shit for that.”

“You don’t need to trade rations,” Terry reminds them, jumping into the conversation as he so often does. “Plenty of food, man.”

“I do my best work on a full stomach.”

“Thought you did your best work hammered.”

Terry chuckles, lying back in the grass. The more things change. 

It’s moments like these that make this worth it. Quiet days where no one’s upset and the weather’s good enough to just lay in, like old dogs sunning themselves on a back porch. Maybe all this stress is imagined. Nobody else seems so uneasy. He feels like hiding, but he doesn’t know from what. So he stays put in the grass, curled in on himself, and tuning out the conversation around him. Olan’s still the only one that knows about Buddy, he wonders if he’s told anyone. Olan doesn’t seem like much of a gossip anyway. He’s mostly worried if he can trust anyone else here with that information.

As soon as he closes his eyes, he feels a gentle bump to his head, looks up, and sees one of Yazan’s cats nuzzling up to him. He smiles. A while ago, the cat he came here with got pregnant somehow, now they have a very small litter of cats that come and go (he was sure to let the male cats out of the premises once they got old enough. Didn’t need more litters than they had.) 

“Hey, kitty,” Terry says softly, scratching behind its ears. He’s always amazed at how everything changed for them, but nothing changed for the animals. Maybe that’s a potent observation on humanity and how it sucks at adapting to permanent change, or whatever. Who knows. 

“Hey!” The cat startles and runs away when it hears Buffalo’s voice booming from the lookout. Terry sits up and looks at him, everyone else doing the same. “Might wanna see this!” 

Before the others can congregate up there and block his view, Terry scrambles up to the lookout point to see what it is. His heart sinks when his old eyes land on her, struggling to stand up, leaning against a cliff for support. It’s Buddy, with blood on her clothes and holding her baby close, dangerously motionless in her arms. 

He can’t get down there fast enough, shoving past a horde of his confused friends trying to figure out what’s going on. He opens the gate, and can only stare dumbly as they stand face to face yet again, but this time, in his own domain.

“I-...You, you’re-“

She staggers onward past him. So close to her now, he can hear her labored breathing as she struggles to stand. The walk from there to here is not too terribly long, he does it every two weeks now, but there are snakes and mutants and natural obstacles on the way that could kill someone so easily. Hell, it could probably kill him a lot easier than it could kill her. 

Terry can already see the other men of the haven thinking about getting a closer look. He thinks of what a leader, a person like Queen would do. 

“Give us space!” He tries to make himself sound commanding. “Somebody help us up to a room, and get the first aid stuff!” His voice wavers but he doesn’t let it quiet him. And they listen. Maybe he’s not as bad at this as he thought.

Olan helps him get her to one of the rooms on the lower floor. Not once does she try to give them her baby, but he can tell something’s wrong when all this excitement hasn’t made him even open his eyes. He steels his nerves and swallows back the incessant need to worry himself sick, and lets her collapse onto the bed of old clothes lying on the floor. 

“Bu-Buddy,” he stutters out like the nervous idiot he is, worried she’ll die on him at any minute. “Can you show me where you’re hurt?”

She stares at him with hazy eyes, trying to process it all, then lifts her poncho enough to reveal the deep, red claw marks that cover most of her arm. It’s bigger than any animal out here could hope to be, which means it’s from a mutant. 

“Shit...I-I mean, it’s not that bad, nothing we can’t fix.” He gives her a shaky, no doubt unconvincing smile. “Is your, um...your baby-“

She cuts him off by lifting the child out to him, her arms shaking just from holding him. “Take him,” her voice is hoarse and almost emotional. “He’s sick, make him better…” it’s not a request, it’s a demand. He knows only desperation would bring her here. She has a stronger will and more stubbornness than even her father, which says a lot. Terry takes the little one into his arms and stares into his pale, sleeping face, warm to the touch. He remembers his own pale, sleeping face, a child in a hospital bed too weak to even lift his head.

Now’s not the time for that. He pushes it back down and nods. “I...Someone’s gonna be here to fix you up, I’m gonna try and, um, get his fever to break…” he feels himself start to cry and turns and books it out of there before she can see it. The last thing she needs is to see the man taking care of her baby start crying like one. 

He makes sure someone he trusts is going in to see her with first aid (it’s Olan, everything’s fine), and takes the baby in to the room where the men there take the occasional bath, which isn’t often. It’s no more than a metal tub in the middle of the room and a pump connected to a well of swamp water outside, mostly safe as long as you don’t drink too much of it. The water’s lukewarm, which is perfect. He’s had to break his own fevers before, too many times. He smiles sadly, because he knows this like he knows the back of his hand, and he knew it before he was ten years old. The baby fusses weakly as he’s slowly lowered into the tub, just full enough to go up to his shoulders.

“Gonna be okay, kiddo,” he says in a hushed voice, fighting back tears even now. “You’re a fighter.” The baby opens his eyes at him and gives a displeased little whine, no doubt confused beyond confusion. All that matters is that he’s responsive. It’s probably just the flu. Granted, the flu in a post-modern medicine Olathe, but still just the flu. 

After a while, he touches the baby’s forehead gingerly with the back of his hand, and he’s content enough with it to end the bath there. Still warm, but good enough, plus the baby’s not as mad at him as he was when he put him in, so that’s a good sign. He takes him back into his arms, wraps him up in a warm old shawl they use as a blanket, and hurries back to Buddy to make sure she’s still alive. The other guys have stayed remarkably out of the way during this. He’ll thank them for that.

Olan’s stitching a claw mark shut when he gets back. She still doesn’t look  _ great _ , but if she was desperate enough to come here it must’ve been serious. 

“His fever went down a bit,” Terry scoots past Olan hard at work to give Buddy back her baby. “Gave him a bath. How are you doing?”

Buddy’s silent for a moment, occasionally wincing from the stitches. She’s wary of everything here, Terry can tell. Eventually, she speaks. “Fine. Had worse.” 

Terry nods. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I won’t be for long.” She says, almost like a warning to stop him from getting his hopes up about the idea of a big, happy family. Twelve dads, a daughter, a baby. He knows it’s not that simple, she doesn’t need to warn him. “Just until I feel safe going back. I don’t want any of them in here with me and the baby unless it’s for helping us get better. You got that?”

Terry nods a second time, a meek but understanding look in his eyes. “Right. I’ll tell them.” 

“Good.”

It’s silent until Olan finishes the stitches, cutting away the excess thread. “All set. Guess you’ll be wanting me to go.” Buddy just glares at him. He gets the message and backs away, leaving Terry, Buddy, and her baby alone in the room.

“I’ll bring dinner to you when it’s ready,” Terry feels awkward, hosting a guest that never wanted to have to come here in the first place. “So, um...guess you followed the hints? I hoped people got that.” He set up his hints strategically, nothing more than directions to the swamplands. As long as they’re helpful, they still have a reason to be there. He feels a little proud. 

Buddy just nods, more focused on how much more active her baby is now than when he was when they came. Not bouncing off the walls or anything, but awake and looking around and making the occasional baby noise. “He hasn’t done anything but cry or sleep for days. How’d you do that?”

Terry leans against the wall and smiles. A little more than proud of all his sick-kid knowledge. “I was a sick kid. When I wasn’t in the hospital, no one really looked out for me, so I had to learn how to do it myself.” That seems to resonate with her. She nods in understanding. “You know, when the flash happened I was so convinced I’d be, like, the first guy to get picked off because I was so weak. But, y’know. Here I am.”

“Yeah. Here you are.” She says distantly, probably exhausted. 

“Well, I won’t bother you too much,” he picks himself up and starts to leave. “Just, um...yell if you need anything. Yell for Terry, that’s my name.”

“I know your name.” She says, sounding just like a tired teenager. He’s glad that that’s still within her despite how much she’s been forced to be an adult. 

“Heh. Good.” He gives a thumbs-up and a dorky expression, the happy-to-help expression he’s pretty sure is his trademark. “See you at dinner. It’s...usually always soup.”

Without another word, he steps out and takes a deep breath, then lets it go. They can do this. He will do this. It’s the least he can do for them. It’s the least he can do for Brad.

Wait.

He shoves his head back through the doorway. “What about your d-“

“Brad’s fine.” She responds, sounding irritated beyond belief. That’s all she says, expecting him to believe that. And there’s nothing he can do to confirm or deny it, so he shuts his mouth and leaves the room again. 

He lets out a sigh he didn’t know he was holding in and starts thinking about how he’s going to explain all this to the guys that didn’t know she was alive, that he’d made friends with her, that she has the first baby born in two decades with her. For the first time in a while, though, he feels confident enough to do that. 

This can work. They can make this work. 


	8. Trust

In her nightmares, she is a little girl like she was when all this started. She is a small child with the sword too big for her hands, too heavy to be held up with her arms. Small and helpless and stuck in a dark hole at the bottom of the earth with the mutant in front of her, and Brad screaming at her to take its life so violently she can see the spit flying out of his mouth. Shaking and crying, she barely manages to cut its chest, then the mutant gets its turn to strike and takes her head off in one bite.

In her nightmares, she is the mutant. In her nightmares, she is everything. A child, a beast, a god. 

She wakes up, her forehead covered in sweat from the heat outside, and her blood-loss-induced nightmare. The baby is still in her arms from when she fell asleep, already awake before her, and yanking on her hair because he doesn’t know any better and is probably bored of waiting for her to get up. That’s a good sign, that there are moments with him again that aren’t made of crying or restless napping. She gently sets him down to stand up and stretch, test her legs to see if they’re good enough to walk on again. She pulls herself up onto her feet against the wall. Still shaking, but not so violently now that the blood loss has stopped. She examines the now stitched-close wounds on her arm, which are still red and angry but hopefully starting to get better. It’s possible she got an infection sometime on her journey here, but it’s impossible to know that right now. She covers it with her poncho and sits back down.

Terry kept true to his word — none of the men here have come in to bother her. It’s not enough to just trust him, which she’s not fully sure she does yet. Her guard is perpetually up, she can’t afford to let it down. Still, though. If they have self-restraint, she can sleep easier at night for the rest of her time here, however long it may be. 

She’s slept long enough without interruption for the sky outside to turn orange, bathing the unlit room in warm light. Feeling her stomach ache with hunger pangs makes her cautiously pull back the curtain to her room, chancing a look outside.

It’s a swamp, plain and simple. The air is foggy and hangs low over their little community lying over the murky waters below. It’s a big place to settle down in, more like one of the small, roadside towns closer to her settlement than anything. This is who she’s been fighting for recovered supplies over, more scavengers fighting like dogs over the same meal. It doesn’t matter. There will always be animals long after all the manmade food is gone. She doesn’t have the energy to consider them enemies, just men that she won’t kill if it’s senseless. Call it maturity, call it convenience. Or call it just being too tired to care. 

She realizes then that Terry is sitting very close to her room, lurking around out of concern, or maybe boredom. Buddy’s almost thankful. Calling out someone else’s name to bring her dinner is completely beneath her, in her own eyes. She  _ gets _ dinner, she doesn’t beg for it.

She clears her throat loud enough for him to hear. He perks up and stands to wait on her.

“Hey! What’s up?” He’s all too cheerful, all too excited to have her here. 

“Uh… is dinner ready yet, or...?” It’s hard for her to have to depend on anyone else for anything. She’d go out and kill a snake to eat if it weren’t for her damned wounds. 

Terry’s ready for the question with two bottles of soup, a thick, hearty one from the way they’re heavy in her hands. “The baby’s old enough to eat that too, I made sure there’s no chunks in it or anything.” 

Buddy nods, going back into her room and allowing Terry to follow. She’s not used to communicating with someone so much but is getting used to hearing Terry’s one-sided conversations in her presence. They sit down across from each other while she slowly lets the baby sip from the mouth of the bottle. 

“You’re really good with him,” Terry says. “Only ever heard him cry when you’re not around.”

Buddy feels the walls she put up around herself almost come down. It’s one thing to be feared. Being feared comes so easy to her now that it’s barely even a conscious way of being. But to hear someone say she’s doing good at being kind, being nurturing to such a weak, fragile thing is almost too much. As she always does, she bites it back and doesn’t let him know that. “Thanks.”

She rarely reflects on how strange it must be, for someone who’s gone so long without seeing a baby because time has made them extinct. Like seeing an animal walking the earth years after the last one of its kind died. When she was little, she was told about dinosaurs and it was her first lesson on how things just stopped existing. Maybe it was intentional. To ease her into the reality that who she was did not exist anymore. To give her something to compare herself to. 

She hesitates with the next words out of her mouth but decides that him doing something stupid would be pretty low right now considering the situation. “Hold him.” Is her offer, holding the boy out to Terry in a gesture of goodwill.

“Really?” He says, astonished and so touched that he looks even more ready to cry than he normally does. “Are you sure? Is that okay?”

“I need to eat. You feed him.”

He takes over as she asks, and she watches as he holds her baby in shaking hands like this is the most important thing he’s ever held, because it is. It makes her wonder how Brad would’ve reacted to him, how their life would be right now minus the consequences of Brad’s vices. Of course, nothing is without consequence in the way she was raised, but she can’t help but imagine her and her sentient father, growing to accept him and not totally forgive what he’d done, but letting him into her life nonetheless. They’re far beyond that now and it never was a possibility to begin with. She’s starting to wonder how many pointless thoughts she has to have before one of value comes to her. It feels like she’s losing her mind.

“Have you thought of a name yet?” Terry asks as the baby tries to drink faster than Terry can safely give it to him. She’s relieved beyond herself to see him eating again. 

“No.” Is her truthful answer. There hasn’t been enough time to think about it. She knows it’s wrong, maybe cruel to keep referring to her only flesh and blood as ‘the baby’, but it also wouldn’t feel right to name him anything at all right now.

“That’s okay,” Terry smiles, just keeps smiling despite everything. “You know, when I was a kid I wrote down a list of names and had one of the nurses at the hospital pick the one she’d name a son if she had one. I was hoping she’d pick this one.”

Buddy furrows her brow in confusion. She truly doesn’t know how life was before the flash, because every concept he just said to her is foreign. She knows of moms despite not having one, knows of dads despite her own bad history with them. That’s all she was taught, moms and dads make kids and they raise those kids together as long as they’re alive. A nurse, a hospital? 

“Did you not have a name before that?” 

Terry’s face drops slightly in some realization that Buddy doesn’t understand, and traces back sheepishly. “I didn’t like my old name.”

That only answers some of it, but she decides not to press any further. Her curiosity is what got her here, and she doesn’t know if ‘here’ is good or not, so she bites her tongue. The manic, joy-fueled little girl that she was years ago is practically voicing her disgust right in her ear. The old Buddy wouldn’t bite her tongue for anything. She’s not the old Buddy anymore, just the remnants of her. And old Buddy is just the remnants of a cheerful, curious little girl that loved to draw and longed to see the world. It’s a vicious cycle. 

Terry’s quick to change the subject. “The other guys were asking about you. If you’re doing okay.” His smile returns. “How are you feeling?”

She doesn’t quite believe they were asking that, or at the very least asking that in good faith, but it doesn’t matter. “Fine.” Before she can say anything else, a sharp pain throbs in her head, and she instinctively reaches out to hold it. It feels like a knife to her temple, a throbbing ache that she hasn’t felt since she gave birth to the baby. She knows exactly what it is. Brad used to complain of the same headaches every time he went sober and joy-free for more than a month. Withdrawals. 

The vaccine, turns out, cured her from becoming a mutant, but didn’t cure her of the small dependence she had built up on it, only taking it long enough for the headaches to flare up when she was in some sort of pain or exhaustion, her body begging her to numb it like the old days. 

“Shit…”

Terry notices her pain and is tense and flighty again. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?”

“Fine.” She grunts and waves him off. The pain subsides after a few minutes, leaving her with a lingering ache that’s present but manageable. “Be better if you could get me some alcohol.”

“Not a chance,” he declares. “No one under twenty-one, that’s my rule!”

Buddy rolls her eyes. Her head hurts too bad to even get angry about being backseat-parented like this. Alcohol’s not even something she does anymore at the risk of reminding herself of certain people, but if joy’s not an option, she craves whiskey instead. The need will be over once the headache’s over. “Uh-huh.”

“That’s right. The youngest guy here is twenty, and I still won’t let him.”

That does catch her interest. That’s two years older than her, going by the arbitrary birthday given to her by Brad and her uncles. It never crossed her mind that there are men that grew up along with the apocalypse, like her. She’s reluctantly curious about the men here despite her aversion to them, just to get more insight on who Brad was and why he attracted so many men to go with him on a meaningless journey to find her. 

“Start telling me about them if you ever want me to trust them.” She offers. If no one’s lost their mind, done something stupid like making a pass at her, then she might as well give them the benefit of the doubt. She doesn’t truly want to stay in this room for the few days she plans on being here. Of course, her sword will always be at her side if things go awry, but she didn’t escape being locked up in a room just to lock herself up in another one. How fast her mind changes when things are too quiet, too suffocating. A devil on her shoulder kicks her for it and reminds her she’s not here to make friends. She’s here for her and her baby to get well. 

Terry blinks at her proposition, and starts counting off men on his fingers. “Well, there’s Olan, the guy who fixed you up with your stitches. Quiet guy, pretty chill. He used to have daughters, y’know.”

Buddy nods to show she’s listening. That man hadn’t said a word to her, the most interaction they’d had was him tipping his hat slightly at her before he turned to leave. A lack of interest in her is the best thing a guy out here can have. She hopes they know what she’s done to the men of Olathe. Hopes they know that she’s killed before and she’ll do it again. Fear is her strongest ally. 

He lists off names and menial facts about the owners of them until the baby won’t eat anymore, full and content. Buddy takes her baby back and lets him sit in her lap. The sun has now dipped below the horizon, the warm, red glow of the sunset fading into deep purples and blues.

“Well, I’ll get out of your hair,” Terry stands and pulls back the curtain door. “Beautiful night. You never really wanna miss a night in Olathe, rare as they are.” He looks back at her and even in the dark she can see him pleading with her to leave her room and look at the sky, spend some time with this man she has no reason to ally herself with beyond him being too weak to put up a fight, too close to her dad to consider it. It’s such a transparent thing he’s doing, wriggling his way into her life like it’s his obligation. It’s her first nature to reject all of it, claim his motives are selfish, leave him with his own burdens because she has enough shit on her plate without some emotionally needy, overly attached and sentimental would-be stepdad. 

They end up outside watching the stars together anyway.

“I know you’re doing this because you feel like you owe it to Brad.” She says, neither of them looking at each other as they speak. 

“I’m not. Brad’s dead, you said it yourself.”

“You still feel like this is what he’d want you to do.”

“I don’t think Brad knew what he wanted. I don’t think I know him well enough to be able to say that.”

“Thought you two were best friends.”

“He  _ was  _ my best friend. I loved him.” They’ve had this same conversation before.

The sky is clear, the world is still. It dawns on her sometimes that they are all that’s left. Fugitives of another catastrophe, the one that made Olathe uninhabitable. Her. 

“Me staying here is a bad idea.”

“I think it’s a pretty good idea. We’re reinforced, the thing that hurt you couldn’t get in.” 

“You think you’re gonna protect me, huh?” There’s venom in her voice. The sentiment of being protected leaves a bitter taste in her mouth. 

“Nah. I can’t even protect me, or my friends.” He breaks his gaze with the sky to look down at his hands. “I mean, you’re an adult anyway, you can protect yourself. It’s just safe here. Safe for people that  _ can’t  _ protect themselves.” He gestures to the baby. 

Buddy looks down into her own lap. Her life became old news when the baby was born. It was no longer about keeping herself safe. For his first few days of his life, she’d made the plan to just leave him somewhere in the hopes some travelers would find him and raise him so she could stay where she felt the most comfortable — alone. That idea obviously hadn’t lasted. There’s a weight on her chest that urges her to do something good for the first time in her life. A weight that never goes away.

“I can protect him, too. You worry about your own, I’ll worry about mine.” 

“Consider it, at least.” Before Buddy has a chance to tell him that she doesn’t need to consider a thing about it, Terry stands up and starts walking deeper into the haven. “See you in the morning, Buddy.” 

She sits there alone until she can bring herself to drag her weary body back into her room. 


	9. Promise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for brief descriptions of multiple animal deaths (hunting)

As it turns out, staying in her temporary room at the haven gets old fast.

As a gesture of goodwill, the men there have either created or scavenged a sort of woven basket perfectly sized to hold her baby so she can put him down while he sleeps, a makeshift crib that’s better than nothing. Terry hands it to her one day and tells her it’s a gift from all of them, a “very late baby shower present”, as he puts it.

Eventually, when she can’t keep herself confined to four walls for most hours in a day, she allows herself to cautiously, gradually start spending her days outside. She’s careful to keep a healthy distance between herself and the men there, but her reputation keeps them at an arm's length anyway. They know it’s the girl that killed their leaders and made Olathe even more uninhabitable than it was before. They won’t mess with her even if they wanted to. But all it takes is one man who thinks he’s brave enough to try. So, for the first few days, her guard stays up.

The most she does is people watch for a while. There was so little time between her escape and now to actually sit and learn. By the time she had a moment to breathe, there were no more people left to watch. Her curiosity has always been persistent, the most lasting part about her. So she’ll sit up on top of the main building here and watch them go about their days. 

She learns a few things up there about the small community they’ve built and the men that live in it. One of the first, most interesting things she learns, is that one of the three names on the list that was crossed off before she started crossing them off herself is here. She thought that the only way to be crossed off the list was to die, but he’s there, a small but strong man with only one eye that they call Buffalo. She wonders if he knows she killed his friends. Of course he does, but whether there are hard feelings or not is a mystery. Had Dusty known him too? Had Dusty known all of them? She wishes he was by her side so she could ask him questions until his ears bled, not just about this. It’s not like she’s going to go up to this guy herself and ask him if he hates her guts or not.

She quickly picks out the one that’s only two years older than her. Hasn’t learned his name yet, but he lives up to his name of being the only one there without grey hairs or laugh lines. Almost naive and eager to fit in. Buddy remembers being naive. Very faintly. She watches him when he makes the others be an audience to his sleight-of-hand magic that usually goes wrong in one way or another, to which the others politely tell him he’s getting better. It must’ve been him who donated the stuffed rabbit to her baby. She brought it with her, it’s back in the room because she can’t stand to rob her kid of something that makes him happy, even when she’s bleeding out. It feels a bit like performing for herself like she has to somehow prove that she’s a better parent to her own child than Brad was to her. That makes her feel like a liar and a petty one at that.

It’s not long before she learns about the presence of a mutant here. They’re affectionate with this one, they will only refer to the mutant with human words, holding on to identifiers like “she” and “her”. Which she doesn’t understand, but she supposes everyone has to hold on to their own sentimentalities to stay sane. Why else would she take the time to bury a man that cut her nipple off, why else would she keep a mutant of her own? Everyone’s holding onto something.

Sometimes while she sits up there and watches, the only thing brave enough to approach her is one of several young cats, cautiously coming up to her and only leaving if she shoos them away or pets them. There was never much time in her life for spending time with animals unless she was hunting them. She can faintly recall a memory where a possum got too close to their home when she was little and, while Brad wasn’t watching, she had picked it up off the ground and decided to keep it. And Brad had to explain to her why a wild animal couldn’t live in the house with them. One of the few choices Brad made that she could understand now, from an adult’s point of view. One of the few memories that still makes her smile. She’s more than happy to let the cats stay and sit with her.

Each day she learns new things about the men here. Learns to put names to faces and meets them without exchanging a word. 

Terry, still being the only one she’s said a word to, tries to persuade her into joining them when they sit around the fire exchanging tired stories and drinking themselves sick. Her answer is always the same.

Over time, the baby gets better. Better than ever, even. He’s crawling almost too fast to keep up with, she can tell he’s starting to hate the room she’s confined them to for the past few weeks just as much as she is. She wonders when he’ll start walking, if it’s her job to teach him or if he’ll just pick it up one day like he did with crawling. Will it all be on his own? How long until he stops needing her? What should be a happy milestone only fills her with dread. If anyone knows the fallout between a parent and child when the child realizes it doesn’t need its parent anymore, it’s her. She still doesn’t even know what to name him. She thinks she must be failing at this. 

What’s more, is that the only thing keeping them tethered here now that her son is healthy again is her. Her wounds are closing fast, and realistically, she stopped needing this place the moment she could reliably walk again. There are some things she’s not willing to admit, like how she doesn’t want to go back home because she has nightmares about the mutant that attacked her. Its corpse is probably starting to decay. There will be hungry predators and the stink of rotten flesh baking in the hot sun. Her home has been defiled. The change to her life and the destruction of her sanctuary invokes feelings she hasn’t felt in a long, long time. Frightened, animalistic feelings that unsettle her so bad they keep her up at night, wide-eyed and shaking thinking about swarms of mutants and animals feasting on the only place she has ever called her own.

More troubling than that, is how she’s scared that when she gets there, Brad will be dead.

No time to worry about it, though. One day, Terry yanks back the curtain to her room with a dramatic flourish, a few other guys standing behind him. “Here’s something I think you’ll like,” he beams down at her. This ought to be good. “Hunting day!”

“Hunting day.” She repeats dryly. It’s not hard to guess what he means, when the guys with him are equipped with hunting knives and bows and arrows. Terry has nothing, though. She bets he only goes for ‘moral support’. 

“Yeah!” He’s so enthusiastic. It seems disingenuous considering she knows he’s not like this all the time. It’s not even his default. All the times it’s been just the two of them, he’s soft-spoken and somber. “You like that kind of thing, right?”

She gives a halfhearted little smirk. “Killing?” She can’t blame him for thinking killing things is a passtime, a hobby for her. Not when she did it so liberally and without question that it made Olathe a ghost town. 

“I-I mean, y’know, being...active,” he retraces his words so it doesn’t sound like he’s calling her a killing machine. “I know you must be good with that sword. What do ya say?”

She glances over at the little hunting troupe he’s gathered with him. The man with the arrows that used to have kids and tended her wounds. Buffalo Van Dyke, from the list. And the man who tends to the cats, now equipped with a sabre not unlike hers. Not by any means a group of men she trusts with her life or anything, but at least she knows their faces. Them with weapons isn’t the most calming image either, but she feels she can trust Terry enough to, at the very least, shield her from them.

Not as if she’d need it. She could kill any one of these men without breaking a sweat.

“Fine.” She grabs her sword. She needs some practice anyway. “Get me something to carry my baby in.”

“You’re bringing him with?” Terry’s cheerful voice quiets to one of concern.

“I bring him with me on all my hunts.” She pushes past him and out the doorway. 

“One of the guys can watch him!”

She huffs. She doesn’t trust these guys  _ that  _ much. But it will be harder to hold him now that he’s got an interest in moving around, not to mention his weight and her wounds not being completely healed. “Get me another guy who used to have kids, or he’s coming with.”

Terry leads her and the baby to one of the other rooms, knocking on the wooden frame for courtesy. “Hey, Birdie, pal?” He says kindly, like talking to an animal. Not different from how he talks to Brad. “You, uh...sober?”

The man, Birdie, sits up in his bed and digs his palm into his eyes to rub sleep out of them. “Yuh-huh, wha’dya need?” He mumbles, then holds his head and winces.

Terry turns to her. Probably senses that the babysitter he’s trying to sell her on has made less than a good impression. He’s hushed like he doesn’t want Birdie to hear. “Birdie had two sons. Nicest guy I’ve ever met, promise.”

Buddy looks from Terry, back to the man in the room. She knows he’s a drunkard. She’s seen him while people-watching from up on the roof. But, judging by the hangover he’s woken up to, he’s probably not started drinking yet today. He also seems to be one of the nicer ones from what she’s seen. She pulls Terry aside again, and for good measure, she grabs his shirt to pull him down to her level so her words are heard loud and clear.

“If something happens to my kid with this guy, it’s your life.” She glares at him with all that fierceness she had that sent men cowering all those years ago.

Terry gives her a scared smile, holding his hands up to portray his innocence. “Y-you have my word.” 

After driving her point home with about ten seconds of her cold stare, she lets him go and hands the baby off to Terry so he can give him to his friend. 

“Birdie, man?” Terry approaches Birdie with the baby, putting a hand on the man’s back. “Can you watch the baby while we’re hunting? You remember I told you about Brad’s daughter, and her baby?”

Buddy watches as Birdie takes her son into his arms, watches his face light up with a kind smile when he realizes what he’s being asked to do. “Oh, my,” he says as he holds the baby so gently and carefully in his arms. “Well, hey, there...Would’ja look at that hair...Joey had dark hair like that…”

She feels her heart soften just a little. There’s a soft kindness to such a scratchy old voice. She’s got the same kind of hoarse whisper, and it’s always felt too harsh, like it’s seen and said too much to be kind enough for a baby’s ears. Hearing it from the outside makes it seem not so bad of a soothing voice after all. 

Buddy swallows back a stupid, sentimental lump in her throat. “Let’s go, then.”

Terry heaves a sigh of relief and gets back to his peppy false self. “Sweet! You won’t regret it!”

That’s yet to be seen.

———

They go into the woods, or what can loosely be called one, by a river she knows fairly well since she’s walked by it many times to find her way back to her own camp. The five of them stay surprisingly out of each other's way and agree to meet back at a large, dead tree massive enough for them to see from a distance. She’s glad they’re not trying to stick her in with a group, she does best when she’s alone. 

Her best bet, working without a long-range weapon, is to stalk from above, in trees or on cliffs, and attack her prey from above. That’s the best way to do it with men, too. 

Stationed up in a tree’s branches, waiting for something to come in range, she gets a glimpse of what the others do. Olan and Buffalo should have no issue — she only then notices that Buffalo is armed with a shotgun — with their long-ranged weapons. She’s always wanted to teach herself to use a bow, but lacked the tools and the time. She watches as the bowman crouches down in the tall grass and makes himself still as possible in waiting. Eventually, he gets his chance and nails a wild turkey with a clean shot to the head. It doesn’t suffer for a second. 

She doesn’t have time to watch more, because her chance comes when she notices a coyote stalking its own prey, low in the tall grass to catch a hare nearby. It doesn’t get the chance. She’s a bit rusty, but still comes back to the meetup spot with a good haul, the beast draped over her shoulders like a pelt.

It’s Buffalo that meets up with her first. A short, but thickly muscled man with an eyepatch and a deer hanging off his shoulder. She’s brought back to memories of fighting her way up the list, crossing off their names in red until there were none left to oppose her. She doesn’t feel guilt for the man standing next to her now. He probably, definitely had to kill for a spot on the list himself. Despite knowing this, she almost feels the need to tell him what she did to his friends, if they even were his friends. She can’t help but think of what could’ve brought him here, alive while the rest of the warlords were long dead. What could Brad have offered him that he wasn’t getting with his title as one of the world’s strongest?

After a long silence, she speaks. “You’re Buff Van Dyke.” Her words are slow and contemplative like she doesn’t know she’s saying them. “From the list.”

Buffalo grins, showing off how many teeth he’s had knocked out in one way or another. From fighting, she assumes. “In the flesh.”

Every normal conversation she’s had with a man out here, the only question in the back of her mind has been to ask why they aren’t attacking her. Why they don’t want to kill her, or worse. What is the motive for standing here and treating her like a person? 

“Did you…” she hates how much she sounds like a curious little brat, not something to be taken seriously. “Did you know Rando?”

“‘Course I knew Rando. Everyone knew Rando.”

“I mean, were you his friend?”

“Guy didn’t have a lotta time for makin’ friends.” Buff shrugs, swatting away the flies drawn in by the deer. “Didn’t talk to any of us at all, had some guy do his talkin’. But, uh, he was nice, I guess. I always thought he could do more with puttin’ those muscles of his to good use, but you know the pacifist types.”

Yeah. She does know. 

“He’s dead.”

“I know. Real shame.”

‘I killed him’ she wants to say. She wants to break down and confess. That was her brother. Rando, Dusty was her brother and she had let him fall. All because she was full of hate and anger. She almost wants this man to be angry with her. She feels like hatred is what she’s earned. 

“I killed your friends. I killed the whole list.”

Buffalo sighs and shrugs. “That’s the way it is with the list. You wanna be on it, you gotta do some shit you’re not proud of.” There’s a look of sadness that he’s trying to hide, but she knows that look well. “Doesn’t matter to me now, kid. I’m too damn old to be angry about that.”

Buddy often dreams of the day when she’ll be too old to be angry. It doesn’t seem possible. She  _ is  _ anger. Anger is all she feels comfortable with.

They’re quiet until the other guys return, each with their own catch of the day over their shoulders. Most surprising about all this is that Terry’s managed to catch some game. His hands are stained an ashen black and she wishes she could’ve seen what he does, how a man that’s so little of a threat stays alive out here and catches his own food. It probably has something to do with fire. She’s seen Dusty use it, too. The only reason she doesn’t know it is because Brad’s fighting style is brute-force based, and she’ll admit she’s not the best shape for brute-force fighting. She’s glad Brad didn’t pass it down to her. Her fighting style is the only thing organically hers, the only thing she has that is not from him. He may have taught her how to stab, but she taught herself how to do it effectively. This is hers. 

As they walk home, Terry pulls off so he’s walking alongside her. “Hey, thanks for coming with us. I knew you’d catch something good.” He elbows her side in a friendly gesture. She’s getting more used to his hovering. Stopped looking for his ulterior motives in being kind. If he’s just doing this out of guilt, so be it. They’ve all got their own baggage.

She brightens a little at the praise. No one’s ever called what she does with a sword ‘good’. “Thanks.”

Surprisingly, it’s the bowsman that talks to her next. “That’s a clean kill,” he nods at her game. She stiffens, less comfortable with talking to him than she is with Terry. She swallows down her apprehension and nods to show she’s accepted the compliment. “And good technique. You’d be good with a bow.”

That gets her to open up a little. She wants to know how to use a ranged weapon. It would cut the time she spends on hunting by taking away all the time she spends waiting for prey to come into her sword’s range. “Thank you.”

“I could teach you, sometime. I taught one of my girls to shoot.”

A lot of good that was to his daughter now. It’s hard for her to imagine another girl. All she has for reference is herself and the women in the magazines. Call it a hunch, but she doesn’t think any of those women are a reliable reference to what Olathian women used to look like.

“Maybe.” Is her only answer. She still doesn’t trust anyone else, but maybe this is progress. 

Maybe she’s just an idiot for even considering it.

She’s expecting the worst when she rushes past them into the haven to see her baby. But when she comes back to where she left him, he’s sleeping soundly in the stranger’s arms, his temporary caregiver no more drunk than he was when they left. Buddy sighs, lets Terry go in and take the baby back from him and hand him over to her.

“See? What did I tell ya?” Terry beams and walks back with her to her own room. “Guy’s a sweetheart.”

“Mhmm.” She says, but she’s not really all there. She’s thinking about her options again. What it would really cost for her to stay here and let her baby grow up in an environment of people that at least somewhat know what they’re doing. If she’s willing to let herself smile again, trust again. She hasn’t been a smiling, trusting girl in so long. That girl is a stranger she would have to get to know all over again. “Terry.”

“Yeah?”

“I trust you.” She turns to look at him with a fierce, intent look on her face. “You need to promise me that I’m not making a mistake.”

“By trusting me?”

“By being here.”

She searches his face for a look of doubt. The only one she can scrutinize is a doubt in himself. “I...I promise.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? You’ll stay here?”

“I’ll think about it.” Buddy departs into her room and closes the curtain door behind her before Terry can follow. She needs some time to think. A lot of time to think. There’s that weight on her chest that makes her feel like she’s suffocating, stuck between the comfortable yet unsustainable past and the horrifying future. Her past home is her prison. A museum of corpses and items from the distant past that surround her and trap her in what she’s always known best: isolation and secrecy. It’s safe there. Or, it was. And it still can be if she would only remember that she has the one thing that keeps the monsters calm. Things have just gotten so busy. Soon, the baby will be a child, he’ll be running and talking and longing for the world outside the world she made for him. This place, full of aging men holding on to a failed society by building their own. 

She curls up with him on the floor, running her fingers through soft black hair, only getting longer every day. “Hey.” She whispers to him until he’s looking at her with his eyes that are still too big for his head. It’s moments like these, she remembers that he is her own. He was made from her, they share the same blood, he is her baby. Even if she doesn’t know how to be his mother.

“I love you.”


	10. Father

She continues to be plagued with the same nightmare. A mutant under a blood-red sky, it’s body massive and terrible and covered in blood from its mouth to its claws. Tearing flesh from bone, a vengeful god devouring something she can’t recognize as human anymore. The nightmare always ends when she realizes the mutant is supposed to be her. 

She jolts awake from it and it’s midnight outside, at the very earliest. Everything is still but for the crickets and cicadas singing away into the murky swamp nightfall. Even her baby wasn’t disturbed by his mother’s sudden movements, and sleeps soundly in his makeshift cradle while Buddy wipes the sweat from her own face and struggles to a sitting position. Even in a supposed safe place, she’s never safe from this.

She’s been pretending to be more okay than she really is for much longer than this, but here it feels like they’re watching her, eyes locked on her waiting for this to become good enough already. And it’s not that it’s not good enough, the members of the haven probably live better than anyone else that survived after the storm, it’s that she doesn’t think she can feel right in any place that’s not six feet underground.

Her stomach clenches tight with anxiety. Some kind of impending dread that she’s no stranger to. She lifts her poncho up and then off to inspect her wound. The man that’s been tending to her injuries since she got here removed the stitches a few days ago, leaving only bright red scars behind. She’s healed. They can leave any time they want to now. 

There’s that pressure again. The pressure to make a decision that will matter to more people than just herself. Her past decisions have been simple because they were decisions made with only her in mind, her own self-preservation instincts. This is more important. 

“It’s not safe here, Buddy.”

She knows what she’s going to see if she looks up.

“Go away.”

He won’t, though.

Hallucinations are a cruel side-effect of everything she’s been through. It’s not always the same person. Sometimes it’s Dustin. Buzzo. Sometimes it’s her uncles, or faces she doesn’t even know. Sometimes it’s nothing but the inky black void she’s speaking into. 

She knows that voice, though.

“Come home with me,” her hallucination pleads, sounding sad and alone. “I’ll keep you safe, little buddy.”

She presses her palms deep into her eyes to black him out, but he’s still there in the corners of her eyes with his breath near her skin and his voice louder than every cicada, every night sound that lives near the swamp.

This is a noose around her neck. A choking grip of unresolved emotions, a story that never got an ending because Brad stopped being human long before she started trying for closure. She’s sick of her identity being bound to someone else’s, wishes she could let go of what happened and just let herself be Buddy, let Brad be Brad, let her become someone that knew how to feel about her own father. She has a bunch of men here that knew him and followed him endlessly until he cut them away, but it becomes no clearer. No late night questions about why Terry ever liked him, or what kind of man he was will ever give her the perspective she needs to just let go. It strangles her for what feels like eternity until she can’t take it anymore. 

“Fuck!” She grips her own hair and shouts into the darkness, more than frustrated with this by now. It’s been haunting her for longer than this, maybe forever. Few things change about her. The world can change, the world can crumble in her merciless hands, but Buddy and the demons that haunt her won’t see that change for themselves. 

She quickly hauls herself to a standing position, grabs her son, sword and trumpet, dutifully ignores the hallucination as she walks right through it, and takes off running. It seizes her like a wild animal, mad with instinct. Her instinct tells her she needs to go back to her home. Back with the graves of everyone who had a part in making her who she is today, right where she belongs. Right in the past.

The baby doesn’t like being woken up like this. He fusses at her. “I’m sorry,” she rasps out, her voice completely taken by the panic she’s under.

The fence gate isn’t that loud, no one hears her operating the simplest of simple machines operated by a heavy lever. She doesn’t know what’s wrong, but something’s very wrong with her. It’s not enough to keep her here. They can’t keep her here. She’s afraid. Like a senseless animal fleeing the hunter’s gun. She must be sick. Maybe her blood was poisoned when it seeped out from her open wounds, maybe she’s been sick her whole life. 

The moon illuminates her as she sprints across the tall grass like a woman possessed. 

She just needs to get back home. 

————

It’s not yet sunrise when she makes it back home. The place feels eerie now, quiet and dark like walking through the home of a man that died long before she was born. A few old Olathian structures still exist, but they’re sparse and made uninhabitable by looting and age. This place might as well be the same way.

The smell of rotting flesh isn’t as strong as she expected, but it’s still powerful and nauseating to get close enough to touch the massive, rotting mutant that broke through her fence. If what it wanted was to make its vile little nest here, it’s won, in a sense. Without getting too close she can see how far along it is in decomposition. Bloated and a sick pale color, with bits of its flesh missing from being picked off by other animals so severely that she can see bone. Its milky white eyes are open and rolled back like terrible white marbles. Mutants decay just like they would if they were still human. They are all the same on the inside.

She tears her eyes away from the gruesome sight and tries to focus in the dark for him. He makes himself known when she treks close enough for him to smell her, and lets out a wail that almost sounds like he missed her.

Still alive. Not a mark that wasn’t already on him. 

She feels stupid. For not following her own words when she told Terry Brad would be fine on his own since he’s an animal and animals know how to take care of themselves. Logic couldn’t save her now. She’s sick to death of having to come to terms with the fact that he’s still important to her every few months since she claimed he was dead to her. 

She collapses, exhausted from the journey, into a sitting position across from him. He’s weeping like he missed her and it’s so pitiful she almost wants to comfort him. Not enough to actually do it, though. 

She lets the baby nurse while she has the time to, regretting her choice to bring him with her. Even if the haven turns out to not be the right fit for her, it has to be the right fit for her son. It just has to be. Seeing the state of their home when she left it is enough to cement it in her mind. He will have to be raised there if he’s going to live to see his first birthday. 

Brad calms down after a few minutes when he gets over it. Back to wallowing in dirt and thinking empty thoughts. To be so peaceful.

Everything is the same. Dusty’s grave is untouched, she passed Buzzo’s on the way here and he’s resting just as soundly. Seeing the mutant decay makes her glad she can’t see it happening to them. She doesn’t want to know what her brother looks like after being dead for five years. 

In a stalemate between her not wanting to leave the place she’s made her home and wanting to abandon it because she’s surrounded by rot and things she can’t let go of, she sits with him until the sun starts to peek over the hills and cliffs. There’s nothing to do but sit and stare, as if she’s paralyzed by the choice she knows she can’t leave here without making.

The logical answer is miles away with people that have made a stable enough community, with at least one man she knows for sure she can trust. The answer that’s right in front of her is the anchor that keeps her in the past, a ball and chain of her own design. Rick once told her that her dad didn’t know how to let go of things. When she asked him what that meant, he became suddenly quiet about it like it was a secret they were keeping from her. It made her so angry, she lashed out at him with all of her childhood rage coiled into a tight ball in the pit of her stomach. They hadn’t even left home when that happened. That was when things were normal. Perhaps not being able to let things go is the family curse. 

She looks down at Brad and sighs with everything in her. When the baby finishes eating, she covers back up and holds him out in front of her so she can look at him. Back when he was a newborn, she didn’t quite know how to hold him and often held him in a similar, uncomfortable position. It’s okay now that he knows how to keep his head up. He puts his little hand in his mouth and blinks at her.

He’s never seen Brad. She’s never let him. Everytime she got the chance to show him the third, strangest and most ostracized member of the family, she’d hold his head close to her chest so he wouldn’t be able to see the mutant. She convinced herself it was because he’d be afraid, but is now coming to terms with the idea that the only one who had been afraid was her. 

“Hi.” she says in her best, awkward replica of what she thinks a parent sounds like. “Someone I want you to meet.” It’s stupid. Stupid because no one she’s talking to right now can understand a word she’s saying. It just feels inexplicably right to do this. She places him in her lap and slowly turns him to face Brad, scooting a little closer, close enough for the baby to touch him if he wanted to.

Buddy holds her breath, expecting loud noises or a look from Brad that she doesn’t like, one that’s too unpredictable. 

She lets it go when the baby leans forward in her arms and curiously touches Brad’s bald head. Not afraid at all.

She doesn’t know where the tears are coming from, but they’re cascading down her scarred cheeks before she knows how to stop them. The child in her weeps because Brad never got to meet her son when he could still think. The murderer in her weeps because she’s tired, so tired of pretending like this doesn’t hurt anymore. 

The sun rises fully over the hills, covering them all in warm, yellow light. The baby’s still not scared of him when it’s bright enough to see him fully, so she doesn’t think he’s ever going to be scared of him. She can’t help a smile. Brave kid. Hopefully he’ll be what she can’t be, keep that bravery but still let himself be gentle and warm to those around him. Every parent wants their kid to grow up and do better than them. Be better. She’s no different. 

She knows what she has to do. Where she has to go.

For the second time, she stands up, gathers the important things. The sword, the trumpet, and her kid. She looks down at Brad and when she moves, he follows her, something like determination in his melted mind that reminds him to follow her this time. 

“Better keep up.” She mutters and wipes tears off her cheeks.

They’re going back home.


	11. Home

She has done this before. It seems all the events in her life have dulled to repeats of previous ones, as if she’s living in an endless memory. A memory where the only thing that changes from place to place is her, who she’s becoming. 

After the decisive death of Olathe, she migrated back west. Nothing had been familiar to her, everything she saw the first time had been a rushed slideshow of places and people that meant nothing as she was taken from one place to the next with everyone looking for her hot on their heels. No, there was not enough time to memorize it all the first time around. 

Thanks to Brad, though, she got to enjoy everything at a snail’s pace. It goes without saying that he doesn’t move like he used to.

The first time, she found out quickly that he would follow her as long as he didn’t lose sight of her. That’s why he was able to stay put while Buddy took her vacation from him at the haven. Even like this, he refuses to separate himself from her. It used to enrage her, she used to kick him in a furious rage when she would try to go scavenging and he’d try to follow her like some loyal pet. He disgusted her. Still does, frankly — all mutants are wretched, upsetting creatures that extract pity from the most sympathetic places in one’s heart, whether one wants them to or not. Some burdens are unkillable, in the figurative and the literal sense.

The baby’s gotten interested in Brad since she let the two meet. She can see him out of the corner of her eye looking over her shoulder as they walk, still curious about the massive creature following them back to the swamplands. She guesses it’s inevitable. Last night put her in a better state of mind about it, but like with everything in her life, there is a healthy amount of fear that comes with it. Mutants are unpredictable at best, and her feelings about Brad as a man instead of a monster are still unresolved. She doubts it ever will get resolved. Maybe that’s okay. 

Despite Brad’s speed, they still manage to make it back to the haven before the sun sets all in one piece, the little fucked-up family that they are. She hopes there’s room for him, hopes that these are the kinds of men that followed him around because they actually liked him. If they are, they’ll be more than happy to accomodate an old friend even when they see what’s become of him. If they’re not, well, they’ll react like everyone else reacts to the monsters. 

Do they even know he’s alive? What has Terry told them? After he mutated and Buzzo took him away, everyone collectively stopped talking about the man that killed the entire Rando army just to get to her. Being a mutant  _ is  _ as good as being dead. They’re in for a hell of a surprise if they don’t already know.

She can walk a couple paces ahead of him before he loses her scent and starts to panic and moan out that name. It’s not hers, and she wonders if she’s just hearing him wrong, mistaking his nonsensical rumbling for a human word, but it’s unlikely. She knew that name long before this, on nights where she was woken up by Brad’s nightmares, sobbing and saying that name until he scared himself awake. She’ll never know who ‘Lisa’ is now. That’s a rare ignorance she’s okay with having. 

She’s curious, as she so often is, about whether or not mutants recognize things from the past, places they’ve been, people they’ve met, lives they lived. She knows he recognizes her. Terry seems convinced Brad recognizes him, too. 

Sometimes she thinks about her real father. The coward on his throne of flesh and his siren’s call. There’s nothing but disgust in those brief memories. She knows Buzzo lied to her. That the coward had truly been her father. It became even more apparent as she started to age and her features began to develop and the baby fat began to melt away. The same nose, the same cold, cruelly pragmatic look in her eyes. Forced to choose between one bad father and one exponentially worse father, the choice is obvious. 

“I don’t know how to separate myself from you.” She mutters, talking to nothing again. They’re getting close now, the tall grass parting for them as they go. “You did everything you could to make yourself part of my fucking identity.”

It is cathartic to talk about it. Before all this, she struggled to feel anything at all. Now, it’s too much feeling. Much more weakness than she’s comfortable having. “And you’re still here.”

Brad groans about something. Probably just the rocks digging into his flesh. 

Her face softens a bit. Even with all the memories she holds about the bad moments between them, good ones still manage to fall through the cracks. How badly she misses that child, the smiling little girl that exists only in the past. Memories of putting expired makeup on him, the deep, warm sound of him humming to her until she fell asleep. Walks not unlike this one, hand-in-hand and picking daisies, listening to funny stories about before, showing him her drawings and watching with delight as he taped them to her wall. There were good times. She can regret a lot of things she said to him in those final days without fully forgiving the things he’s done, the man he was. Only thing about that is that she doesn’t fully even  _ know  _ the man he was because of the walls he built around himself, all the measures that were taken to make him the stern and cold yet pitiful person that raised her. In a strange way, she gets a better sense of who he was now that he’s a monster. Clingy and sad and lost without a purpose. 

The haven’s spiked, wooden fence comes into view. It does a good job of hiding what lies inside. That might do less good for its favor in the long run. Someone might want to break in, find out what secrets lie beyond those sturdy oak doors. If they know all that’s in there is middle-aged men, they probably wouldn’t be as intrigued. 

That’s a joke if she’s ever heard one. They are truly the only ones left.

Swallowing her pride enough to admit she’s come running back here after a hallucination scared her into it, she bangs hard on the fence and manages to find her voice. “It’s Buddy.”

The gate swings open and it’s the bowman, looking almost relieved to see her. Opens his mouth as if he’s going to ask her something, but she can see the words die on his lips when he notices her plus-one. He removes his hat and places it against his chest, wide-eyed and slack jawed like he’s seen a ghost. 

He doesn’t get a word in greeting, she just pushes right past him fast enough that Brad can’t really process it and follow her. She expects they’re gonna have a nice, happy reunion amongst themselves and that’s fine with her, she’s frankly had enough time with him for a few days. 

The plan is to get Terry out here so he can do what he wants with the mutant outside, find a place for him or start crying on each other since that seems like something a gang of depressed, middle-aged burnouts living together in some kind of old man zoo of their own making, and she’ll go to her room and feed her baby again and maybe take the longest sleep of her life. If she lets herself stay awake thinking on her decision to move here, she’ll drive herself crazy. She hasn’t been this tired in a long, long time. Feels wrong for it all to be so easy, that they just live here now and that’s it. Buddy hates easy. Apparently things need to be as difficult as possible or else they don’t mean anything at all. 

She knocks on the wooden walls before pulling back the curtain to his room. The light streams in and falls on a man, huddled in the corner so tight and small like he’s trying to make himself disappear. He’s decades older than her, but the way he likes to cower makes his soul seem so much weaker. There’s tears on Terry’s face when he looks up and notices her. 

She can’t get a word out before he’s on his feet, almost knocking her back with a hug she’s nowhere near ready for. 

“You can’t do that to me, man,” he weeps. She is paralyzed, staring blankly into the open sky. “I thought you were just... _ gone _ .”

Touch is not a thing she likes to welcome. In her life, touch has become synonymous with fear. People don’t hug her, because hugging her means getting cut. 

Terry continues, but distances the two of them again and doesn’t even register the conflict on her face. It’s just a normal hug for him. “Please, don’t do that again, I-I was so fucking worried!” He’s crying, but she’s still processing it.

Worry. She didn’t consider it. In her mind, people come and go freely and nobody needs to tell anyone else because for the past five years, it’s only been her. An entity that comes and goes when she pleases. And every single person here knows she can defend herself on her own, even with a mutant’s claw marks furrowed deep into her flesh, she is more capable and more deadly than the men they once called kings, Olathian gods brought down to her feet with blood pouring from their necks like any other man with less. There is truly no need to worry about her.

But he did. Why? 

She says nothing for a long time. Surely long enough for Terry to notice the small crowd forming around Brad, all his old friends marvelling to see him here alive in some form. Terry, if anyone, should be the first down there with him. 

And she should be incredulous that Terry thinks he’s owed an explanation for her disappearing in the night, because she’s not bound to tell him everything, everywhere she goes. It’s in her nature to turn away caring. She doesn’t want to be cared about because the last person she cared about was Dustin, the brother that she buried with her own hands. She closed his dead eyes for him, she wrapped him in his cloak and dug a grave for him. People that care about her never end up making it out alive. 

Everything that has happened since the day they met has been alien to her. Nothing but bizarre encounters and conversations for someone that had already come to terms with not having any encounters outside of the fence she built to keep them out. If she’s being honest, it hasn’t made a bit of sense since the beginning. All that’s certain is that whatever it is, she wants it for her child. Safety in numbers, people that know more than her about raising a kid in the apocalypse. 

The lingering question is this; can she want it for herself, too? 

And maybe, it’s the fact that she expected to mean nothing compared to what she brought back with her. Maybe she’s just so rattled by the hug she can’t process her emotions enough to go back on the defensive.

Maybe she doesn’t want to have to be on the defensive anymore.

Maybe she’s so tired of keeping her guard up. 

Maybe it’s the first time she’s felt like more than just an extension of the man who raised her.

In the grand scheme of things, none of them mean anything. They are simply the last living residents of a world that had its death planned out for it by a coward who thought he was a god. Sentimentality and forged families are trivial. But in a world going nowhere, maybe there’s nothing wrong with being trivial. She’s not going to call him ‘dad’, not going to let him see her as a daughter. That’s not what she wants anymore. The world had its chance to give her a father, to let her be a daughter. That chance is over. 

Maybe she can let him care about her, though.

Buddy looks to the ground. Not in shame but in deep thought. Eventually, she comes up with words that won’t betray her persisting need to be callous but will also let him know that he’s done more for her just by freaking out about this than anything ever will.

“Calm down. I wasn’t going anywhere.” She turns away from him. The other haven men sure did miss their monster. “Thought you wanted to see your best friend before another mutant got to him.”

Terry gives a curt little huff, the most impolite thing she’s seen him do after months of knowing him and it’s just a small, frustrated sigh. Looks like the kid’s gonna grow up with some good role models after all. “I would’ve gone with you. Please don’t do that again.”

Awful presumptuous of him. “I’m not a child.”

“You stress me out like one sometimes.”

That gets her to smile a little. Reminds her of how her uncles used to talk to her. 

She can’t live in the past anymore. Neither her, nor her son will grow up if she lets them stew in a prison of her own making. She has fought so hard to be free from these shackles, it doesn’t make sense to keep them on. 

“I thought of what I wanted to name him.”

“Really?” Terry’s voice and face soften. That’s enough to make him forgive her, apparently. “What?”

“Dustin.”


	12. Epilogue

Near the haven’s wooden stake fence, there is a sturdy white oak stripped bare of all its leaves. The branches, though they will never see growth again, are still strong and thick enough to bear weight. When her son got big enough to run and climb, the haven men that could still boast their strength found and rolled over a tire from a long since totaled car, got some rope and tied it to one of the stronger branches. His tire swing. 

It somehow feels like both a brand new and a decades old memory, watching him as he taught himself to no longer be afraid of his feet being off the ground, to begging her to push him higher and faster. His favorite thing for a while, before he moved onto new favorite things. Not a lot of ways to entertain a child these days, but they did what she’s told ancient humans did, and they made toys for him out of what they had. 

The tire swing has gone unused for some years now. Spider webs are growing on it, a feast of little bugs caught in the middle. She stubs her finished cigarette on the trunk of its tree, all lost after a long rain and looking to do some thinking out here where nobody goes anymore. 

The cigarettes are a nasty little habit she picked up from one of the others, she doesn’t remember who. Just that they’re good for being in the swamplands when the snakes hate the smell of smoke and there’s nothing to calm one down like a repetitive, mindless activity. 

Clouds still thickly coat the sky after a heavy rainstorm with more to come no doubt, making the swamplands dark and foggy. It’s quiet right now like it never is anymore. Gives her a moment to breathe. As much as she can breathe under the humid swamp air.

Things largely have stayed the same. There has been no resurgence of human life, no threats that can’t be quelled with her trumpet’s song. No deaths yet. At night she dreams that they are all immortal. They are not even alive, trapped between this world and the next, a comfortable purgatory that has become so normal they’ve forgotten that they’re all dead.

When she wakes, their hearts still beat, flesh still bleeds. She recounts how many scraped knees and snake bites she’s had to mend and knows that they are all just as alive as they were on the day they were born. Someday soon, one of them is going to die and she will have to have that talk with her son, but the longer it doesn’t exist here, the better. Once he knows about death, he’ll start worrying about it creeping closer and who knows how long it will be before he accepts that it is  _ always _ coming closer? Some of the men here still haven’t accepted that.

She finishes her smoke and heads back inside to the closest thing to a society Olathe will ever see. It’s become easier to deal with.

Her first instinct as a mother is to pick him out in a crowd whenever she comes back home. He’s no longer vague enough in appearance to be described as a spitting image. His hair has a bit of wave to it now, and a warm tone on his skin from being raised primarily outdoors, something she was never really able to say for herself, even after the outdoors became less of a fantasy world and more of a dull reality. 

She didn’t mark the day he was born down on paper and nobody in Olathe kept track of time enough to know the date off the top of his head, so they made an arbitrary calendar full of arbitrary dates that started when they made it, as if they were crafting time itself. Terry kept it in one of his diaries and to her knowledge was rather faithful at keeping up to date with it. Her son’s birthday started on the first day of the haven’s calendar. All that to say he is, very roughly, ten years old.

When she sees him, he is sitting on the ground, the only one listening to Nern as he weaves a long, pointless story to someone who’s still full of enough wonder to not be bored to sleep by it. She can’t pass up smiling at the sight. The old man’s stories are boring to everyone who’s already seen the world and experienced far more interesting things than the time he lost his car keys right before work. But the boy’s never known anything beyond the haven, anything before it has been gone for many, many years. 

Buddy supposes he’ll start wanting to see the rest of the world soon. She’s not sure how to tell him there isn’t much left to see. The haven beats living in the underground floor of a dirt hut, but it’s still a prison. Any home we start out with as humans is just a prison to be escaped from.

She climbs the ropes to get to him. His eyes still brighten when he sees his mother. How long will that last?

“...and would you believe it, he returned the book only a  _ day  _ before it would’ve been late!” Nern reaches the thrilling climax of his story when Buddy reaches them. “Buddy my girl, you just missed the story about the missing library book, care to have me tell it again?”

“No thanks.” She takes Dustin by the hand and gets him on his feet. Sometimes she struggles with the name she chose for him, with the memories it brings back. But it always helps her to remember Dusty, the original Dusty, and that’s always going to be invaluable to her. Remembering him is the best way to honor him in death. “Want to see grandpa?” She looks down at her son. 

‘Grandpa’. She hadn’t even known what it meant until the other haven men started calling Brad that in reference to her father and her son’s relationship. It’s childish. She still can’t even call Brad ‘dad’ in good conscience but she lets her son refer to the monster with such an affectionate word. The ancient sentimentality of this place has rubbed off on her in unforeseen ways. 

He nods, walking ahead with his hand still in hers, practically dragging her to what can only be called the mutant pen. A stable of mangled flesh. She can’t help questioning if mutants live forever unless directly slaughtered. Both the haven’s mutated residents haven’t aged a day.

Terry’s there when they get down to where the mutants are kept, like he often is. Buddy thinks he comes down here to think. The lack of meaningful conversation can be peaceful. He’s sitting between Queen and Brad like they’re a couple of giant floor pillows. Sometimes she even catches him reading to them. His diary entries, mostly. 

Terry notices them when Dustin climbs the fence to see Brad. She doesn’t know what the kid sees in being here with them. She won’t judge. 

She sits up on the fence, lighting up another cigarette when her kid is far enough away so he doesn’t eventually pick it up as a habit like she did. Ten years and she still doesn’t know a damn thing about being a parent, but from the way Terry disapproves of the cigarettes as if he’s ever had any authority over it at all, it’s safe to assume nobody wants their kids inhaling smoke for a fix.

“Having fun?” Buddy asks him when Terry stands up from his mutant pile and joins her sitting on the fence. She can see his age on his face, they’re all getting older faster than they realize. If her son’s ten, that makes her twenty-eight. She never imagined twenty-eight. She imagined a joy-fueled slip into madness, a bloody death, slumped up against a rock somewhere and bleaching away under the scorching wasteland sun. 

The corners of Terry’s lips, bordered with permanent laugh lines, turn up in a far-away, contemplative grin. “Always fun when the T-man’s around.” 

Buddy rolls her eyes and takes a drag from her poison, blowing smoke up to join the clouded air above. “They say anything interesting today?” She nods to the mutants, who almost seem to smile when Dustin climbs into their pen. 

“Just to stay in school, don’t do drugs, the usual.” He stretches and she can hear all the pops and cracks from his weary bones loud and clear. She can’t judge too harshly when she herself has gotten old enough to hurt all over every time she wakes up. Still spry and quick to the draw with her sword (she still practices, someone here needs to sharp on their feet just in case) but sometimes her back gives her hell. “See anything good out there?”

“I was only by the oak. Didn’t go past it.” She’s well aware they’re all idle conversation, talking about nothing in particular, how the weather’s been. With all the theatrics of her life settling down here alongside her, there is not much more to say than what’s already been said. And it’s nice. She tired quickly of the same topics, life, death and the choices they all made. The past is no longer the hottest topic of discussion; she’s grateful for that. 

It’s a nice day out despite the threat of rain. Maybe when he’s done, she’ll see if there’s something he wants to do, go on a walk or a hunt. She’s only gotten handier with a ranged weapon since she started learning how to shoot a bow, it won’t be hard. If she thought life had ceased to be about her and started to be about her son when he was a baby, she had no idea it would only become truer and truer the more he grew up. Teaching moments are everything to the wide-eyed and unknowing in a world that will not stop to teach them itself. She still doesn’t feel like the perfect mother, even if she had a reference to begin to compare herself to. Who knows, teaching a kid how to take a bird out mid-flight with a single arrow might be the most motherly thing she’ll ever do.

“I think I’m gonna go on a walk with him. Nice day out.” 

“Make him wear his poncho, it looks like it’s gonna rain.” The amount of worry on Terry’s face, you’d think the rain was acid. 

She waves him off but makes a note of it in her head like she does with all his concerns and slides off the fence, calling for her son to go with her. Terry ruffles his hair and reminds them to be safe, and again they part ways. 

Her feelings about labels have not changed. Been decades since she had the desire to call anyone a father, brother, or even a role model. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t grown fond of the new normal, which at this point is just the normal. It still feels foreign in a way she can’t describe, foreign and unusual despite living here unbothered for each of those ten years. She’s already admitted that there are people alive that care about her. Just a matter of when she’s ready to admit the feeling is, and has been mutual for a long time.

She pulls Dustin aside to drape his poncho over his shoulders, it’s regrettably good advice. Terry has done his best despite her pushback to parent her at every turn. She takes her son’s hand again and leads him out the gate, into the wide, open expanse of nothing that surrounds them.

A possible motherly habit of hers is fiddling with his hair, brushing it away from his eyes or tucking wavy black strands behind his ears. They don’t bother cutting it that often, maybe they should soon. It’s getting a little out of hand even by an apocalypse survivor’s standards. “You’re quiet today.” Buddy observes as she fiddles with his hair, gingerly working out a tight knot with one of her fingers. 

“I’m tired…” he rubs at one of his eyes with his hand. She smiles down at him, endeared. 

“Rough day?” She says with a snort, knowing the hardest things he has to do around here are putting up with the old man’s stories and making sure Rooster’s chickens are fed since he broke down the grumpy old farmer until he conceded to letting the boy help with his precious birds. Kid’s got a fondness for animals, she’s noticed that. Maybe she’ll save the shooting lesson for after she properly explains that they need to hunt to live and usually the animals they kill don’t suffer for even a second if you know what you’re doing. 

Dustin yawns and nods, missing the absurdity of someone so small having such an apparently busy day. He’s a kid of few words, which is surprising given how much all the haven men love to talk. Probably knew how to swear before he knew how to walk. She herself was raised with the lesson that you shouldn’t swear until you’re older, because despite being raised past the human concept of purity, Brad still overcompensated for it and tried to raise her at least somewhat with a resemblance to how pre-flash children were raised. She doubts there’s much of a point in her doing the same — how many pre-flash children were raised around a group of thirteen, loud, boozed-up middle aged men? But he’s still a good kid. As much as she thinks she’s failing him, he’s still good.

“Wanna head back?” She asks, letting him lean his weary head on her side as they walk. 

“No…” is all he says, no explanation. She’d kill to know what goes on in the little shit’s head, only ten and he’s already keeping his secrets. Quiet and shy without a reason to be. As long as he’s happy.

They tread over the tall grass together with the sky rumbling somewhere overhead. Olathe is at peace. Occasionally she wonders if they truly are what’s left, or if they just haven’t gone far enough. Humans are pests; they find a way to survive every opportunity to be killed off. It doesn’t matter. Age has brought her bloodlust for adventure to a manageable background noise. She looks down at her son, who lets his fingers wade through the tall grass as they pass, soft, long blades touching his hand as he passes in a fleeting ‘hello’. How confusing it must be to be born asking questions to a mother that has no answers. She can’t tell him why the grass grows taller here, why the sky is blue, why his entire world had to be made up of 13 grown men, two mutants, some chickens, some cats, and his old mother who used to kill men for sport but now reads bedtime stories and plays with his hair. 

The questions she knows the answers to seem to be the hardest ones to answer. 

“What happened to your eye?”

“What?” She has to stop to look at him, because it’s so out of left field she thinks she might’ve imagined it.

Dustin reaches up and puts his hand over his own eye while staring up at hers, like he’s trying to make sure he doesn’t have the same scars. “Your eye. Why’s it got scars?”

For a moment, panic grips her when she recalls the incident, razor-like claws raking her face, blood pooling in her vision but not so much that it kept her from watching Brad beat the man black and blue before crushing his neck beneath his foot like stepping on a bug. Horrible memories, just as fresh in her mind as they were ten years ago. 

“Someone hurt me,” Buddy composes herself enough to be a mother again. “But he won’t hurt you. Don’t worry.” She wasn’t even aware they were still visible. Been so long.

“Why’d he hurt you?”

That’s right. He doesn’t know why anyone would want to hurt his mom. Doesn’t know how important she used to be, how men died because they thought they would save Olathe by using her. 

“He just didn’t like me, I guess.”

“Well…” Dustin looks away and bites his nail like he’s deep in thought. Eventually he grabs her hand again and his eye contact is more human than any of them, untainted, clean and innocent. What humanity ought to be. “I like you.”

Relief. Pure relief like nobody could ever know. The relief of doing things right for once in her life.

“I like you too, kid.” 

And on the way home, as she’s watching the ground for snakes lurking in the white, dead fields of the swamplands, she sees it.

A single white flower. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo there it is, all done ^^ i just wanted to thank you all for supporting this series til the end and all your nice comments. It all means the world to me and i couldnt have finished it without you. So thank you all, hope you’ll enjoy whatever I come up with next <3

**Author's Note:**

> first multi-chapter in 3 years lets gooooo
> 
> not sure I'm great at writing buddy yet but let me know! comments are very appreciated! I'm estimating maybe 6 or 7 chapters of this but who knows
> 
> Thank you for reading!!


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